The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton Part Two

Part 1 out of 3

The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton
A Ten-Part Collection
Part Two

Contents of Part Two

Stories
AFTERWARD............................January 1910
THE FULNESS OF LIFE..................December 1893
A VENETIAN NIGHT'S ENTERTAINMENT.....December 1903
XINGU................................December 1911
THE VERDICT..........................June 1908
THE RECKONING........................August 1902

Verse

BOTTICELLI'S MADONNA IN THE LOUVRE...January 1891
THE TOMB OF ILARIA GIUNIGI...........February 1891
THE SONNET...........................November 1891
TWO BACKGROUNDS......................November 1892
EXPERIENCE...........................January 1893
CHARTRES.............................September 1893
LIFE.................................June 1894
AN AUTUMN SUNSET.....................October 1894

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.

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.

"But doesn't this suit worry you? Why have you never spoken to
me about it?"

He answered both questions at once: "I didn't speak of it at
first because it DID worry me--annoyed me, rather. But it's all
ancient history now. Your correspondent must have got hold of a
back number of the 'Sentinel.'"

She felt a quick thrill of relief. "You mean it's over? He's
lost his case?"

There was a just perceptible delay in Boyne's reply. "The suit's
been withdrawn--that's all."

But she persisted, as if to exonerate herself from the inward
charge of being too easily put off. "Withdrawn because he saw he
had no chance?"

"Oh, he had no chance," Boyne answered.

She was still struggling with a dimly felt perplexity at the back
of her thoughts.

"How long ago was it withdrawn?"

He paused, as if with a slight return of his former uncertainty.
"I've just had the news now; but I've been expecting it."

"Just now--in one of your letters?"

"Yes; in one of my letters."

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.

"It's all right--it's all right?" she questioned, through the
flood of her dissolving doubts; and "I give you my word it never
was righter!" he laughed back at her, holding her close.

III

One of the strangest things she was afterward to recall out of
all the next day's incredible strangeness was the sudden and
complete recovery of her sense of security.

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,--as if this dim
questioning of the future, and startled return upon the past,--
had between them liquidated the arrears of some haunting moral
obligation. If she had indeed been careless of her husband's
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.

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's 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,--even the flora of Lyng was in the note!--
she 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.

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, "for one's good," so complete a trust in
its power to gather up her life and Ned's into the harmonious
pattern of the long, long story it sat there weaving in the sun.

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--perhaps a traveler--
desirous 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: "Is there any one you wish to see?"

"I came to see Mr. Boyne," 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
"on business," and civilly but firmly aware of his rights.

Past experience had made Mary equally sensible to such claims;
but she was jealous of her husband's morning hours, and doubtful
of his having given any one the right to intrude on them.

"Have you an appointment with Mr. Boyne?" she asked.

He hesitated, as if unprepared for the question.

"Not exactly an appointment," he replied.

"Then I'm afraid, this being his working-time, that he can't
receive you now. Will you give me a message, or come back
later?"

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.

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.

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's 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 "righter."

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.

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.

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.

She turned back to the parlor-maid.

"Mr. Boyne must be up-stairs. Please tell him that luncheon is
ready."

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, "If you please, Madam, Mr.
Boyne's not up-stairs."

"Not in his room? Are you sure?"

"I'm sure, Madam."

Mary consulted the clock. "Where is he, then?"

"He's gone out," Trimmle announced, with the superior air of one
who has respectfully waited for the question that a well-ordered
mind would have first propounded.

Mary's 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, "Please, Madam, Mr. Boyne didn't go that way."

Mary turned back. "Where DID he go? And when?"

"He went out of the front door, up the drive, Madam." It was a
matter of principle with Trimmle never to answer more than one
question at a time.

"Up the drive? At this hour?" 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.

"Did Mr. Boyne leave no message?" she asked.

Trimmle seemed to surrender herself to a last struggle with the
forces of chaos.

"No, Madam. He just went out with the gentleman."

"The gentleman? What gentleman?" Mary wheeled about, as if to
front this new factor.

"The gentleman who called, Madam," said Trimmle, resignedly.

"When did a gentleman call? Do explain yourself, Trimmle!"

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's eye the dawning
defiance of the respectful subordinate who has been pressed too
hard.

"I couldn't exactly say the hour, Madam, because I didn't let the
gentleman in," she replied, with the air of magnanimously
ignoring the irregularity of her mistress's course.

"You didn't let him in?"

"No, Madam. When the bell rang I was dressing, and Agnes--"

"Go and ask Agnes, then," Mary interjected. Trimmle still wore
her look of patient magnanimity. "Agnes would not know, Madam,
for she had unfortunately burnt her hand in trying the wick of
the new lamp from town--" Trimmle, as Mary was aware, had always
been opposed to the new lamp--"and so Mrs. Dockett sent the
kitchen-maid instead."

Mary looked again at the clock. "It's after two! Go and ask the
kitchen-maid if Mr. Boyne left any word."

She went into luncheon without waiting, and Trimmle presently
brought her there the kitchen-maid's statement that the gentleman
had called about one o'clock, that Mr. Boyne had gone out with
him without leaving any message. The kitchen-maid did not even
know the caller's 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.

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's 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's withdrawal from business he had
adopted a Benedictine regularity of life. As if to make up for
the dispersed and agitated years, with their "stand-up" lunches
and dinners rattled down to the joltings of the dining-car, he
cultivated the last refinements of punctuality and monotony,
discouraging his wife's fancy for the unexpected; and declaring
that to a delicate taste there were infinite gradations of
pleasure in the fixed recurrences of habit.

Still, since no life can completely defend itself from the
unforeseen, it was evident that all Boyne's 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.

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.

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's desk lay precisely as they had lain when
she had gone in to call him to luncheon.

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.

The long, quavering summons brought Trimmle in precipitately with
a lamp, and Mary breathed again at this sobering reappearance of
the usual.

"You may bring tea if Mr. Boyne is in," she said, to justify her
ring.

"Very well, Madam. But Mr. Boyne is not in," said Trimmle,
putting down the lamp.

"Not in? You mean he's come back and gone out again?"

"No, Madam. He's never been back."

The dread stirred again, and Mary knew that now it had her fast.

"Not since he went out with--the gentleman?"

"Not since he went out with the gentleman."

"But who WAS the gentleman?" Mary gasped out, with the sharp note
of some one trying to be heard through a confusion of meaningless
noises.

"That I couldn't say, Madam." Trimmle, standing there by the
lamp, seemed suddenly to grow less round and rosy, as though
eclipsed by the same creeping shade of apprehension.

"But the kitchen-maid knows--wasn't it the kitchen-maid who let
him in?"

"She doesn't know either, Madam, for he wrote his name on a
folded paper."

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.

"But he must have a name! Where is the paper?"

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's hand, with his pen lying
across it, as though dropped there at a sudden summons.

"My dear Parvis,"--who was Parvis?--"I have just received your
letter announcing Elwell's death, and while I suppose there is
now no farther risk of trouble, it might be safer--"

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.

"But the kitchen-maid SAW him. Send her here," she commanded,
wondering at her dullness in not thinking sooner of so simple a
solution.

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.

The gentleman was a stranger, yes--that 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--had 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.

"Then you don't know what he wrote? You're not sure it WAS his
name?"

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.

"And when you carried the paper in to Mr. Boyne, what did he
say?"

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.

"But then, if you left them in the library, how do you know that
they went out of the house?"

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.

"Then, if you saw the gentleman twice, you must be able to tell
me what he looked like."

But with this final challenge to her powers of expression it
became clear that the limit of the kitchen-maid's endurance had
been reached. The obligation of going to the front door to "show
in" 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, "His hat, mum, was different-like, as you
might say--"

"Different? How different?" 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.

"His hat had a wide brim, you mean? and his face was pale--a
youngish face?" 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--the
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?

IV

It leaped out at her suddenly, like a grin out of the dark, that
they had often called England so little--"such a confoundedly
hard place to get lost in."

A CONFOUNDEDLY HARD PLACE TO GET LOST IN! That had been her
husband's 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's 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's
anguished eyes as if with the malicious joy of knowing something
they would never know!

In the fortnight since Boyne's 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 "the
gentleman" who accompanied him. All inquiries in the
neighborhood failed to elicit the memory of a stranger's 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.

Mary, while every external means of investigation was working at
its highest pressure, had ransacked her husband's 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's 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--if it were indeed an
exception--the 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.

"I have just heard of Elwell's death, and while I suppose there
is now no farther risk of trouble, it might be safer--" That was
all. The "risk of trouble" 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 "Parvis" 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.

This negative information, sole fruit of the first fortnight's
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.

Even Mary Boyne's 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.

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 "change." 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.

No, she would never know what had become of him--no one would
ever know. But the house KNEW; 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.

V

"I don't say it WASN'T straight, yet don't say it WAS straight.
It was business."

Mary, at the words, lifted her head with a start, and looked
intently at the speaker.

When, half an hour before, a card with "Mr. Parvis" 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's 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's last
known thought had been directed.

Parvis, civilly, but without vain preamble,--in the manner of a
man who has his watch in his hand,--had set forth the object of
his visit. He had "run over" 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's family.

The words touched the spring of some obscure dread in Mary's
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?

"I know nothing--you must tell me," 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 "getting ahead" of some one less alert to seize the
chance; the victim of his ingenuity was young Robert Elwell, who
had "put him on" to the Blue Star scheme.

Parvis, at Mary's first startled cry, had thrown her a sobering
glance through his impartial glasses.

"Bob Elwell wasn't smart enough, that's all; if he had been, he
might have turned round and served Boyne the same way. It's the
kind of thing that happens every day in business. I guess it's
what the scientists call the survival of the fittest," said Mr.
Parvis, evidently pleased with the aptness of his analogy.

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.

"But then--you accuse my husband of doing something
dishonorable?"

Mr. Parvis surveyed the question dispassionately. "Oh, no, I
don't. I don't even say it wasn't straight." He glanced up and
down the long lines of books, as if one of them might have
supplied him with the definition he sought. "I don't say it
WASN'T straight, and yet I don't say it WAS straight. It was
business." After all, no definition in his category could be
more comprehensive than that.

Mary sat staring at him with a look of terror. He seemed to her
like the indifferent, implacable emissary of some dark, formless
power.

"But Mr. Elwell's lawyers apparently did not take your view,
since I suppose the suit was withdrawn by their advice."

"Oh, yes, they knew he hadn't a leg to stand on, technically. It
was when they advised him to withdraw the suit that he got
desperate. You see, he'd borrowed most of the money he lost in
the Blue Star, and he was up a tree. That's why he shot himself
when they told him he had no show."

The horror was sweeping over Mary in great, deafening waves.

"He shot himself? He killed himself because of THAT? "

"Well, he didn't kill himself, exactly. He dragged on two months
before he died." Parvis emitted the statement as unemotionally
as a gramophone grinding out its "record."

"You mean that he tried to kill himself, and failed? And tried
again?"

"Oh, he didn't have to try again," said Parvis, grimly.

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.

"But if you knew all this," she began at length, hardly able to
force her voice above a whisper, "how is it that when I wrote you
at the time of my husband's disappearance you said you didn't
understand his letter?"

Parvis received this without perceptible discomfiture. "Why, I
didn't understand it--strictly speaking. And it wasn't 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."

Mary continued to scrutinize him. "Then why are you telling me
now?"

Still Parvis did not hesitate. "Well, to begin with, I supposed
you knew more than you appear to--I mean about the circumstances
of Elwell's death. And then people are talking of it now; the
whole matter's been raked up again. And I thought, if you didn't
know, you ought to."

She remained silent, and he continued: "You see, it's only come
out lately what a bad state Elwell's affairs were in. His wife's
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--
something 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--"

Parvis broke off to fumble in an inner pocket. "Here," he
continued, "here's an account of the whole thing from the
'Sentinel'--a little sensational, of course. But I guess you'd
better look it over."

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 "Sentinel" had first shaken
the depths of her security.

As she opened the paper, her eyes, shrinking from the glaring
head-lines, "Widow of Boyne's Victim Forced to Appeal for Aid,"
ran down the column of text to two portraits inserted in it. The
first was her husband's, 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.

"I thought if you felt disposed to put your name down--" she
heard Parvis continue.

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.

"This is the man--the man who came for my husband!"

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.

"It's the man! I should know him anywhere!" she cried in a voice
that sounded in her own ears like a scream.

Parvis's voice seemed to come to her from far off, down endless,
fog-muffled windings.

"Mrs. Boyne, you're not very well. Shall I call somebody? Shall
I get a glass of water?"

"No, no, no!" She threw herself toward him, her hand frantically
clenching the newspaper. "I tell you, it's the man! I KNOW him!
He spoke to me in the garden!"

Parvis took the journal from her, directing his glasses to the
portrait. "It can't be, Mrs. Boyne. It's Robert Elwell."

"Robert Elwell?" Her white stare seemed to travel into space.
"Then it was Robert Elwell who came for him."

"Came for Boyne? The day he went away?" Parvis's voice dropped
as hers rose. He bent over, laying a fraternal hand on her, as
if to coax her gently back into her seat. "Why, Elwell was dead!
Don't you remember?"

Mary sat with her eyes fixed on the picture, unconscious of what
he was saying.

"Don't you remember Boyne's unfinished letter to me--the one you
found on his desk that day? It was written just after he'd heard
of Elwell's death." She noticed an odd shake in Parvis's
unemotional voice. "Surely you remember that!" he urged her.

Yes, she remembered: that was the profoundest horror of it.
Elwell had died the day before her husband's disappearance; and
this was Elwell's 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--words 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.

"This was the man who spoke to me," she repeated.

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.
"He thinks me mad; but I'm not mad," she reflected; and suddenly
there flashed upon her a way of justifying her strange
affirmation.

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: "Will you answer me one
question, please? When was it that Robert Elwell tried to kill
himself?"

"When--when?" Parvis stammered.

"Yes; the date. Please try to remember."

She saw that he was growing still more afraid of her. "I have a
reason," she insisted gently.

"Yes, yes. Only I can't remember. About two months before, I
should say."

"I want the date," she repeated.

Parvis picked up the newspaper. "We might see here," he said,
still humoring her. He ran his eyes down the page. "Here it is.
Last October--the--"

She caught the words from him. "The 20th, wasn't it?" With a
sharp look at her, he verified. "Yes, the 20th. Then you DID
know?"

"I know now." Her white stare continued to travel past him.
"Sunday, the 20th--that was the day he came first."

Parvis's voice was almost inaudible. "Came HERE first?"

"Yes."

"You saw him twice, then?"

"Yes, twice." She breathed it at him with dilated eyes. "He
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." She
felt a faint gasp of inward laughter at the thought that but for
that she might have forgotten.

Parvis continued to scrutinize her, as if trying to intercept her
gaze.

"We saw him from the roof," she went on. "He 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."

"Elwell had vanished?" Parvis faltered.

"Yes." Their two whispers seemed to grope for each other. "I
couldn't think what had happened. I see now. He TRIED to come
then; but he wasn't dead enough--he couldn't reach us. He had to
wait for two months; and then he came back again--and Ned went
with him."

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.

"Oh, my God! I sent him to Ned--I told him where to go! I sent
him to this room!" she screamed out.

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.

"You won't know till afterward," it said. "You won't know till
long, long afterward."

The End of Afterward

THE FULNESS OF LIFE
December 1893

I.

For hours she had lain in a kind of gentle torpor, not unlike
that sweet lassitude which masters one in the hush of a midsummer
noon, when the heat seems to have silenced the very birds and
insects, and, lying sunk in the tasselled meadow-grasses, one
looks up through a level roofing of maple-leaves at the vast
shadowless, and unsuggestive blue. Now and then, at ever-
lengthening intervals, a flash of pain darted through her, like
the ripple of sheet-lightning across such a midsummer sky; but it
was too transitory to shake her stupor, that calm, delicious,
bottomless stupor into which she felt herself sinking more and
more deeply, without a disturbing impulse of resistance, an
effort of reattachment to the vanishing edges of consciousness.

The resistance, the effort, had known their hour of violence; but
now they were at an end. Through her mind, long harried by
grotesque visions, fragmentary images of the life that she was
leaving, tormenting lines of verse, obstinate presentments of
pictures once beheld, indistinct impressions of rivers, towers,
and cupolas, gathered in the length of journeys half forgotten--
through her mind there now only moved a few primal sensations of
colorless well-being; a vague satisfaction in the thought that
she had swallowed her noxious last draught of medicine . . . and
that she should never again hear the creaking of her husband's
boots--those horrible boots--and that no one would come to bother
her about the next day's dinner . . . or the butcher's book. . . .

At last even these dim sensations spent themselves in the
thickening obscurity which enveloped her; a dusk now filled with
pale geometric roses, circling softly, interminably before her,
now darkened to a uniform blue-blackness, the hue of a summer
night without stars. And into this darkness she felt herself
sinking, sinking, with the gentle sense of security of one upheld
from beneath. Like a tepid tide it rose around her, gliding ever
higher and higher, folding in its velvety embrace her relaxed and
tired body, now submerging her breast and shoulders, now creeping
gradually, with soft inexorableness, over her throat to her chin,
to her ears, to her mouth. . . . Ah, now it was rising too high;
the impulse to struggle was renewed;. . . her mouth was full;. . .
she was choking. . . . Help!

"It is all over," said the nurse, drawing down the eyelids with
official composure.

The clock struck three. They remembered it afterward. Someone
opened the window and let in a blast of that strange, neutral air
which walks the earth between darkness and dawn; someone else led
the husband into another room. He walked vaguely, like a blind
man, on his creaking boots.

II.

She stood, as it seemed, on a threshold, yet no tangible gateway
was in front of her. Only a wide vista of light, mild yet
penetrating as the gathered glimmer of innumerable stars,
expanded gradually before her eyes, in blissful contrast to the
cavernous darkness from which she had of late emerged.

She stepped forward, not frightened, but hesitating, and as her
eyes began to grow more familiar with the melting depths of light
about her, she distinguished the outlines of a landscape, at
first swimming in the opaline uncertainty of Shelley's vaporous
creations, then gradually resolved into distincter shape--the
vast unrolling of a sunlit plain, aerial forms of mountains, and
presently the silver crescent of a river in the valley, and a
blue stencilling of trees along its curve--something suggestive
in its ineffable hue of an azure background of Leonardo's,
strange, enchanting, mysterious, leading on the eye and the
imagination into regions of fabulous delight. As she gazed, her
heart beat with a soft and rapturous surprise; so exquisite a
promise she read in the summons of that hyaline distance.

"And so death is not the end after all," in sheer gladness she
heard herself exclaiming aloud. "I always knew that it couldn't
be. I believed in Darwin, of course. I do still; but then
Darwin himself said that he wasn't sure about the soul--at least,
I think he did--and Wallace was a spiritualist; and then there
was St. George Mivart--"

Her gaze lost itself in the ethereal remoteness of the mountains.

"How beautiful! How satisfying!" she murmured. "Perhaps now I
shall really know what it is to live."

As she spoke she felt a sudden thickening of her heart-beats, and
looking up she was aware that before her stood the Spirit of
Life.

"Have you never really known what it is to live?" the Spirit of
Life asked her.

"I have never known," she replied, "that fulness of life which we
all feel ourselves capable of knowing; though my life has not
been without scattered hints of it, like the scent of earth which
comes to one sometimes far out at sea."

"And what do you call the fulness of life?" the Spirit asked
again.

"Oh, I can't tell you, if you don't know," she said, almost
reproachfully. "Many words are supposed to define it--love and
sympathy are those in commonest use, but I am not even sure that
they are the right ones, and so few people really know what they
mean."

"You were married," said the Spirit, "yet you did not find the
fulness of life in your marriage?"

"Oh, dear, no," she replied, with an indulgent scorn, "my
marriage was a very incomplete affair."

"And yet you were fond of your husband?"

"You have hit upon the exact word; I was fond of him, yes, just
as I was fond of my grandmother, and the house that I was born
in, and my old nurse. Oh, I was fond of him, and we were counted
a very happy couple. But I have sometimes thought that a woman's
nature is like a great house full of rooms: there is the hall,
through which everyone passes in going in and out; the drawing-
room, where one receives formal visits; the sitting-room, where
the members of the family come and go as they list; but beyond
that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles of whose doors
perhaps are never turned; no one knows the way to them, no one
knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the holy of
holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never
comes."

"And your husband," asked the Spirit, after a pause, "never got
beyond the family sitting-room?"

"Never," she returned, impatiently; "and the worst of it was that
he was quite content to remain there. He thought it perfectly
beautiful, and sometimes, when he was admiring its commonplace
furniture, insignificant as the chairs and tables of a hotel
parlor, I felt like crying out to him: 'Fool, will you never
guess that close at hand are rooms full of treasures and wonders,
such as the eye of man hath not seen, rooms that no step has
crossed, but that might be yours to live in, could you but find
the handle of the door?'"

"Then," the Spirit continued, "those moments of which you lately
spoke, which seemed to come to you like scattered hints of the
fulness of life, were not shared with your husband?"

"Oh, no--never. He was different. His boots creaked, and he
always slammed the door when he went out, and he never read
anything but railway novels and the sporting advertisements in
the papers--and--and, in short, we never understood each other in
the least."

"To what influence, then, did you owe those exquisite
sensations?"

"I can hardly tell. Sometimes to the perfume of a flower;
sometimes to a verse of Dante or of Shakespeare; sometimes to a
picture or a sunset, or to one of those calm days at sea, when
one seems to be lying in the hollow of a blue pearl; sometimes,
but rarely, to a word spoken by someone who chanced to give
utterance, at the right moment, to what I felt but could not
express."

"Someone whom you loved?" asked the Spirit.

"I never loved anyone, in that way," she said, rather sadly, "nor
was I thinking of any one person when I spoke, but of two or
three who, by touching for an instant upon a certain chord of my
being, had called forth a single note of that strange melody
which seemed sleeping in my soul. It has seldom happened,
however, that I have owed such feelings to people; and no one
ever gave me a moment of such happiness as it was my lot to feel
one evening in the Church of Or San Michele, in Florence."

"Tell me about it," said the Spirit.

"It was near sunset on a rainy spring afternoon in Easter week.
The clouds had vanished, dispersed by a sudden wind, and as we
entered the church the fiery panes of the high windows shone out
like lamps through the dusk. A priest was at the high altar, his
white cope a livid spot in the incense-laden obscurity, the light
of the candles flickering up and down like fireflies about his
head; a few people knelt near by. We stole behind them and sat
down on a bench close to the tabernacle of Orcagna.

"Strange to say, though Florence was not new to me, I had never
been in the church before; and in that magical light I saw for
the first time the inlaid steps, the fluted columns, the
sculptured bas-reliefs and canopy of the marvellous shrine. The
marble, worn and mellowed by the subtle hand of time, took on an
unspeakable rosy hue, suggestive in some remote way of the honey-
colored columns of the Parthenon, but more mystic, more complex,
a color not born of the sun's inveterate kiss, but made up of
cryptal twilight, and the flame of candles upon martyrs' tombs,
and gleams of sunset through symbolic panes of chrysoprase and
ruby; such a light as illumines the missals in the library of
Siena, or burns like a hidden fire through the Madonna of Gian
Bellini in the Church of the Redeemer, at Venice; the light of
the Middle Ages, richer, more solemn, more significant than the
limpid sunshine of Greece.

"The church was silent, but for the wail of the priest and the
occasional scraping of a chair against the floor, and as I sat
there, bathed in that light, absorbed in rapt contemplation of
the marble miracle which rose before me, cunningly wrought as a
casket of ivory and enriched with jewel-like incrustations and
tarnished gleams of gold, I felt myself borne onward along a
mighty current, whose source seemed to be in the very beginning
of things, and whose tremendous waters gathered as they went all
the mingled streams of human passion and endeavor. Life in all
its varied manifestations of beauty and strangeness seemed
weaving a rhythmical dance around me as I moved, and wherever the
spirit of man had passed I knew that my foot had once been
familiar.

"As I gazed the mediaeval bosses of the tabernacle of Orcagna
seemed to melt and flow into their primal forms so that the
folded lotus of the Nile and the Greek acanthus were braided with
the runic knots and fish-tailed monsters of the North, and all
the plastic terror and beauty born of man's hand from the Ganges
to the Baltic quivered and mingled in Orcagna's apotheosis of
Mary. And so the river bore me on, past the alien face of
antique civilizations and the familiar wonders of Greece, till I
swam upon the fiercely rushing tide of the Middle Ages, with its
swirling eddies of passion, its heaven-reflecting pools of poetry
and art; I heard the rhythmic blow of the craftsmen's hammers in
the goldsmiths' workshops and on the walls of churches, the
party-cries of armed factions in the narrow streets, the organ-
roll of Dante's verse, the crackle of the fagots around Arnold of
Brescia, the twitter of the swallows to which St. Francis
preached, the laughter of the ladies listening on the hillside to
the quips of the Decameron, while plague-struck Florence howled
beneath them--all this and much more I heard, joined in strange
unison with voices earlier and more remote, fierce, passionate,
or tender, yet subdued to such awful harmony that I thought of
the song that the morning stars sang together and felt as though
it were sounding in my ears. My heart beat to suffocation, the
tears burned my lids, the joy, the mystery of it seemed too
intolerable to be borne. I could not understand even then the
words of the song; but I knew that if there had been someone at
my side who could have heard it with me, we might have found the
key to it together.

"I turned to my husband, who was sitting beside me in an attitude
of patient dejection, gazing into the bottom of his hat; but at
that moment he rose, and stretching his stiffened legs, said,
mildly: 'Hadn't we better be going? There doesn't seem to be
much to see here, and you know the table d'hote dinner is at
half-past six o'clock."

Her recital ended, there was an interval of silence; then the
Spirit of Life said: "There is a compensation in store for such
needs as you have expressed."

"Oh, then you DO understand?" she exclaimed. "Tell me what
compensation, I entreat you!"

"It is ordained," the Spirit answered, "that every soul which
seeks in vain on earth for a kindred soul to whom it can lay bare
its inmost being shall find that soul here and be united to it
for eternity."

A glad cry broke from her lips. "Ah, shall I find him at last?"
she cried, exultant.

"He is here," said the Spirit of Life.

She looked up and saw that a man stood near whose soul (for in
that unwonted light she seemed to see his soul more clearly than
his face) drew her toward him with an invincible force.

"Are you really he?" she murmured.

"I am he," he answered.

She laid her hand in his and drew him toward the parapet which
overhung the valley.

"Shall we go down together," she asked him, "into that marvellous
country; shall we see it together, as if with the self-same eyes,
and tell each other in the same words all that we think and feel?"

"So," he replied, "have I hoped and dreamed."

"What?" she asked, with rising joy. "Then you, too, have looked
for me?"

"All my life."

"How wonderful! And did you never, never find anyone in the
other world who understood you?"

"Not wholly--not as you and I understand each other."

"Then you feel it, too? Oh, I am happy," she sighed.

They stood, hand in hand, looking down over the parapet upon the
shimmering landscape which stretched forth beneath them into
sapphirine space, and the Spirit of Life, who kept watch near the
threshold, heard now and then a floating fragment of their talk
blown backward like the stray swallows which the wind sometimes
separates from their migratory tribe.

"Did you never feel at sunset--"

"Ah, yes; but I never heard anyone else say so. Did you?"

"Do you remember that line in the third canto of the 'Inferno?'"

"Ah, that line--my favorite always. Is it possible--"

"You know the stooping Victory in the frieze of the Nike
Apteros?"

"You mean the one who is tying her sandal? Then you have
noticed, too, that all Botticelli and Mantegna are dormant in
those flying folds of her drapery?"

"After a storm in autumn have you never seen--"

"Yes, it is curious how certain flowers suggest certain painters--
the perfume of the incarnation, Leonardo; that of the rose,
Titian; the tuberose, Crivelli--"

"I never supposed that anyone else had noticed it."

"Have you never thought--"

"Oh, yes, often and often; but I never dreamed that anyone else had."

"But surely you must have felt--"

"Oh, yes, yes; and you, too--"

"How beautiful! How strange--"

Their voices rose and fell, like the murmur of two fountains
answering each other across a garden full of flowers. At length,
with a certain tender impatience, he turned to her and said:
"Love, why should we linger here? All eternity lies before us.
Let us go down into that beautiful country together and make a
home for ourselves on some blue hill above the shining river."

As he spoke, the hand she had forgotten in his was suddenly
withdrawn, and he felt that a cloud was passing over the radiance
of her soul.

"A home," she repeated, slowly, "a home for you and me to live in
for all eternity?"

"Why not, love? Am I not the soul that yours has sought?"

"Y-yes--yes, I know--but, don't you see, home would not be like
home to me, unless--"

"Unless?" he wonderingly repeated.

She did not answer, but she thought to herself, with an impulse
of whimsical inconsistency, "Unless you slammed the door and wore
creaking boots."

But he had recovered his hold upon her hand, and by imperceptible
degrees was leading her toward the shining steps which descended
to the valley.

"Come, O my soul's soul," he passionately implored; "why delay a
moment? Surely you feel, as I do, that eternity itself is too
short to hold such bliss as ours. It seems to me that I can see
our home already. Have I not always seem it in my dreams? It is
white, love, is it not, with polished columns, and a sculptured
cornice against the blue? Groves of laurel and oleander and
thickets of roses surround it; but from the terrace where we walk
at sunset, the eye looks out over woodlands and cool meadows
where, deep-bowered under ancient boughs, a stream goes
delicately toward the river. Indoors our favorite pictures hang
upon the walls and the rooms are lined with books. Think, dear,
at last we shall have time to read them all. With which shall we
begin? Come, help me to choose. Shall it be 'Faust' or the
'Vita Nuova,' the 'Tempest' or 'Les Caprices de Marianne,' or the
thirty-first canto of the 'Paradise,' or 'Epipsychidion' or
"Lycidas'? Tell me, dear, which one?"

As he spoke he saw the answer trembling joyously upon her lips;
but it died in the ensuing silence, and she stood motionless,
resisting the persuasion of his hand.

"What is it?" he entreated.

"Wait a moment," she said, with a strange hesitation in her
voice. "Tell me first, are you quite sure of yourself? Is there
no one on earth whom you sometimes remember?"

"Not since I have seen you," he replied; for, being a man, he had
indeed forgotten.

Still she stood motionless, and he saw that the shadow deepened
on her soul.

"Surely, love," he rebuked her, "it was not that which troubled
you? For my part I have walked through Lethe. The past has
melted like a cloud before the moon. I never lived until I saw
you."

She made no answer to his pleadings, but at length, rousing
herself with a visible effort, she turned away from him and moved
toward the Spirit of Life, who still stood near the threshold.

"I want to ask you a question," she said, in a troubled voice.

"Ask," said the Spirit.

"A little while ago," she began, slowly, "you told me that every
soul which has not found a kindred soul on earth is destined to
find one here."

"And have you not found one?" asked the Spirit.

"Yes; but will it be so with my husband's soul also?"

"No," answered the Spirit of Life, "for your husband imagined
that he had found his soul's mate on earth in you; and for such
delusions eternity itself contains no cure."

She gave a little cry. Was it of disappointment or triumph?

"Then--then what will happen to him when he comes here?"

"That I cannot tell you. Some field of activity and happiness he
will doubtless find, in due measure to his capacity for being
active and happy."

She interrupted, almost angrily: "He will never be happy without me."

"Do not be too sure of that," said the Spirit.

She took no notice of this, and the Spirit continued: "He will
not understand you here any better than he did on earth."

"No matter," she said; "I shall be the only sufferer, for he
always thought that he understood me."

"His boots will creak just as much as ever--"

"No matter."

"And he will slam the door--"

"Very likely."

"And continue to read railway novels--"

She interposed, impatiently: "Many men do worse than that."

"But you said just now," said the Spirit, "that you did not love
him."

"True," she answered, simply; "but don't you understand that I
shouldn't feel at home without him? It is all very well for a
week or two--but for eternity! After all, I never minded the
creaking of his boots, except when my head ached, and I don't
suppose it will ache HERE; and he was always so sorry when he had
slammed the door, only he never COULD remember not to. Besides,
no one else would know how to look after him, he is so helpless.
His inkstand would never be filled, and he would always be out of
stamps and visiting-cards. He would never remember to have his
umbrella re-covered, or to ask the price of anything before he
bought it. Why, he wouldn't even know what novels to read. I
always had to choose the kind he liked, with a murder or a
forgery and a successful detective."

She turned abruptly to her kindred soul, who stood listening with
a mien of wonder and dismay.

"Don't you see," she said, "that I can't possibly go with you?"

"But what do you intend to do?" asked the Spirit of Life.

"What do I intend to do?" she returned, indignantly. "Why, I
mean to wait for my husband, of course. If he had come here
first HE would have waited for me for years and years; and it
would break his heart not to find me here when he comes." She
pointed with a contemptuous gesture to the magic vision of hill
and vale sloping away to the translucent mountains. "He wouldn't
give a fig for all that," she said, "if he didn't find me here."

"But consider," warned the Spirit, "that you are now choosing for
eternity. It is a solemn moment."

"Choosing!" she said, with a half-sad smile. "Do you still keep
up here that old fiction about choosing? I should have thought
that YOU knew better than that. How can I help myself? He will
expect to find me here when he comes, and he would never believe
you if you told him that I had gone away with someone else--
never, never."

"So be it," said the Spirit. "Here, as on earth, each one must
decide for himself."

She turned to her kindred soul and looked at him gently, almost
wistfully. "I am sorry," she said. "I should have liked to talk
with you again; but you will understand, I know, and I dare say
you will find someone else a great deal cleverer--"

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