Stories of Terror and the Supernatural

by Herman Graf

  “That was quite enough,” said Mrs Marden. “It isn’t what you say that determines it; it’s what you feel. That’s what he goes by.”

  I was annoyed, at last, by her reiterated reference to an identity yet to be established, and I clasped my hands with an air of supplication which covered much real impatience, a sharper curiosity and even the first short throbs of a certain sacred dread. “I entreat you to tell me whom you’re talking about.”

  She threw up her arms, looking away from me, as if to shake off both reserve and responsibility. “Sir Edmund Orme.”

  “And who is Sir Edmund Orme?”

  At the moment I spoke she gave a start. “Hush, here they come.” Then as, following the direction of her eyes, I saw Charlotte Marden on the terrace, at the window, she added, with an intensity of warning: “Don’t notice him—never!”

  Charlotte, who had had her hands beside her eyes, peering into the room and smiling, made a sign that she was to be admitted, on which I went and opened the long window. Her mother turned away, and the girl came in with a laughing challenge: “What plot, in the world are you two hatching here?” Some plan—I forget what—was in prospect for the afternoon, as to which Mrs Marden’s participation or consent was solicited—my adhesion was taken for granted—and she had been half over the place in her quest. I was flurried, because I saw that Mrs Marden was flurried (when she turned round to meet her daughter she covered it by a kind of extravagance, throwing herself on the girl’s neck and embracing her), and to pass it off I said, fancifully, to Charlotte:

  “I’ve been asking your mother for your hand.”

  “Oh, indeed, and has she given it?” Miss Marden answered, gayly.

  “She was just going to when you appeared there.”

  “Well, it’s only for a moment—I’ll leave you free.”

  “Do you like him, Charlotte?” Mrs Marden asked, with a candour I scarcely expected.

  “It’s difficult to say it before him isn’t it?” the girl replied, entering into the humour of the thing, but looking at me as if she didn’t like me.

  She would have had to say it before another person as well, for at that moment there stepped into the room from the terrace (the window had been left open), a gentleman who had come into sight, at least into mine, only within the instant. Mrs Marden had said “Here they come,” but he appeared to have followed her daughter at a certain distance. I immediately recognised him as the personage who had sat beside us in church. This time I saw him better, saw that his face and his whole air were strange. I speak of him as a personage, because one felt, indescribably, as if a reigning prince had come into the room. He held himself with a kind of habitual majesty, as if he were different from us. Yet he looked fixedly and gravely at me, till I wondered what he expected of me. Did he consider that I should bend my knee or kiss his hand? He turned his eyes in the same way on Mrs Marden, but she knew what to do. After the first agitation produced by his approach she took no notice of him whatever; it made me remember her passionate adjuration to me. I had to achieve a great effort to imitate her, for though I knew nothing about him but that he was Sir Edmund Orme I felt his presence as a strong appeal, almost as an oppression. He stood there without speaking—young, pale, handsome, clean-shaven, decorous, with extraordinary light blue eyes and something old-fashioned, like a portrait of years ago, in his head, his manner of wearing his hair. He was in complete mourning (one immediately felt that he was very well dressed), and he carried his hat in his hand. He looked again strangely hard at me, harder than anyone in the world had ever looked before; and I remember feeling rather cold and wishing he would say something. No silence had ever seemed to me so soundless. All this was of course an impression intensely rapid; but that it had consumed some instants was proved to me suddenly by the aspect of Charlotte Marden, who stared from her mother to me and back again (he never looked at her, and she had no appearance of looking at him), and then broke out with: “What on earth is the matter with you? You’ve such odd faces!” I felt the colour come back to mine, and when she went on in the same tone: “One would think you had seen a ghost!” I was conscious that I had turned very red. Sir Edmund Orme never blushed, and I could see that he had no capacity for embarrassment. One had met people of that sort, but never anyone with such a grand indifference.

  “Don’t be impertinent; and go and tell them all that I’ll join them,” said Mrs Marden with much dignity, but with a quaver in her voice.

  “And will you come—you?” the girl asked, turning away. I made no answer, taking the question, somehow, as meant for her companion. But he was more silent than I, and when she reached the door (she was going out that way), she stopped, with her hand on the knob, and looked at me, repeating it. I assented, springing forward to open the door for her, and as she passed out she exclaimed to me mockingly: “You haven’t got your wits about you—you sha’n’t have my hand!”

  I closed the door and turned round to find that Sir Edmund Orme had during the moment my back was presented to him retired by the window. Mrs Marden stood there and we looked at each other long. It had only then—as the girl flitted away—come home to me that her daughter was unconscious of what had happened. It was that, oddly enough, that gave me a sudden, sharp shake, and not my own perception of our visitor, which appeared perfectly natural. It made the fact vivid to me that she had been equally unaware of him in church, and the two facts together—now that they were over—set my heart more sensibly beating. I wiped my forehead, and Mrs Marden broke out with a low distressful wail: “Now you know my life—now you know my life!”

  “In God’s name who is he—what is he?”

  “He’s a man I wronged.”

  “How did you wrong him?”

  “Oh, awfully—years ago.”

  “Years ago? Why, he’s very young.”

  “Young—young?” cried Mrs Marden. “He was born before I was!”

  “Then why does he look so?”

  She came nearer to me, she laid her hand on my arm, and there was something in her face that made me shrink a little. “Don’t you understand—don’t you feel?” she murmured, reproachfully.

  “I feel very queer!” I laughed; and I was conscious that my laugh betrayed it.

  “He’s dead!” said Mrs Marden, from her white face.

  “Dead?” I panted. “Then that gentleman was—?” I couldn’t even say the word.

  “Call him what you like—there are twenty vulgar names. He’s a perfect presence.”

  “He’s a splendid presence!” I cried. “The place is haunted— haunted!” I exulted in the word as if it represented the fulfilment of my dearest dream.

  “It isn’t the place—more’s the pity! That has nothing to do with it!”

  “Then it’s you, dear lady?” I said, as if this were still better.

  “No, nor me either—I wish it were!”

  “Perhaps it’s me,” I suggested with a sickly smile.

  “It’s nobody but my child—my innocent, innocent child!” And with this Mrs Marden broke down—she dropped into a chair and burst into tears. I stammered some question—I pressed on her some bewildered appeal, but she waved me off, unexpectedly and passionately. I persisted—couldn’t I help her, couldn’t I intervene? “You have intervened,” she sobbed; “you’re in it, you’re in it.”

  “I’m very glad to be in anything so curious,” I boldly declared.

  “Glad or not, you can’t get out of it.”

  “I don’t want to get out of it—it’s too interesting.”

  “I’m glad you like it. Go away.”

  “But I want to know more about it.”

  “You’ll see all you want—go away!”

  “But I want to understand what I see.”

  “How can you—when I don’t understand myself?”

  “We’ll do so together—we’ll make it out.”

  At this she got up, doing what she could to obliterate her tears. “Yes, it will be better together—that’s
why I’ve liked you.”

  “Oh, we’ll see it through!” I declared.

  “Then you must control yourself better.”

  “I will, I will—with practice.”

  “You’ll get used to it,” said Mrs Marden, in a tone I never forgot. “But go and join them—I’ll come in a moment.”

  I passed out to the terrace and I felt that I had a part to play. So far from dreading another encounter with the ‘perfect presence’, as Mrs Marden called it, I was filled with an excitement that was positively joyous. I desired a renewal of the sensation—I opened myself wide to the impression; I went round the house as quickly as if I expected to overtake Sir Edmund Orme. I didn’t overtake him just then, but the day was not to close without my recognising that, as Mrs Marden had said, I should see all I wanted of him.

  We took, or most of us took, the collective sociable walk which, in the English country-house, is the consecrated pastime on Sunday afternoons. We were restricted to such a regulated ramble as the ladies were good for; the afternoons, moreover, were short, and by five o’clock we were restored to the fireside in the hall, with a sense, on my part at least, that we might have done a little more for our tea. Mrs Marden had said she would join us, but she had not appeared; her daughter, who had seen her again before we went out, only explained that she was tired. She remained invisible all the afternoon, but this was a detail to which I gave as little heed as I had given to the circumstance of my not having Miss Marden to myself during all our walk. I was too much taken up with another emotion to care; I felt beneath my feet the threshold of the strange door, in my life, which had suddenly been thrown open and out of which unspeakable vibrations played up through me like a fountain. I had heard all my days of apparitions, but it was a different thing to have seen one and to know that I should in all probability see it familiarly, as it were, again. I was on the lookout for it, as a pilot for the flash of a revolving light, and I was ready to generalise on the sinister subject, to declare that ghosts were much less alarming and much more amusing than was commonly supposed. There is no doubt that I was extremely nervous. I couldn’t get over the distinction conferred upon me—the exception (in the way of mystic enlargement of vision), made in my favour. At the same time I think I did justice to Mrs Marden’s absence; it was a commentary on what she had said to me—“Now you know my life.” She had probably been seeing Sir Edmund Orme for years, and, not having my firm fibre, she had broken down under him. Her nerve was gone, though she had also been able to attest that, in a degree, one got used to him. She had got used to breaking down.

  Afternoon tea, when the dusk fell early, was a friendly hour at Tranton; the firelight played into the wide, white last-century hall; sympathies almost confessed themselves, lingering together, before dressing, on deep sofas, in muddy boots, for last words, after walks; and even solitary absorption in the third volume of a novel that was wanted by some one else seemed a form of geniality. I watched my moment and went over to Charlotte Marden when I saw she was about to withdraw. The ladies had left the place one by one, and after I had addressed myself particularly to Miss Marden the three men who were near her gradually dispersed. We had a little vague talk—she appeared preoccupied, and heaven knows I was—after which she said she must go: she should be late for dinner. I proved to her by book that she had plenty of time, and she objected that she must at any rate go up to see her mother: she was afraid she was unwell.

  “On the contrary, she’s better than she has been for a long time—I’ll guarantee that,” I said. “She has found out that she can have confidence in me, and that has done her good.” Miss Marden had dropped into her chair again. I was standing before her, and she looked up at me without a smile—with a dim distress in her beautiful eyes; not exactly as if I were hurting her, but as if she were no longer disposed to treat as a joke what had passed (whatever it was, it was at the same time difficult to be serious about it), between her mother and myself. But I could answer her inquiry in all kindness and candour, for I was really conscious that the poor lady had put off a part of her burden on me and was proportionately relieved and eased. “I’m sure she has slept all the afternoon as she hasn’t slept for years,” I went on. “You have only to ask her.”

  Charlotte got up again. “You make yourself out very useful.”

  “You’ve a good quarter of an hour,” I said. “Haven’t I a right to talk to you a little this way, alone, when your mother has given me your hand?”

  “And is it your mother who has given me yours? I’m much obliged to her, but I don’t want it. I think our hands are not our mothers’— they happen to be our own!” laughed the girl.

  “Sit down, sit down and let me tell you!” I pleaded.

  I still stood before her, urgently, to see if she wouldn’t oblige me. She hesitated a moment, looking vaguely this way and that, as if under a compulsion that was slightly painful. The empty hall was quiet— we heard the loud ticking of the great clock. Then she slowly sank down and I drew a chair close to her. This made me face round to the fire again, and with the movement I perceived, disconcertedly, that we were not alone. The next instant, more strangely than I can say, my discomposure, instead of increasing, dropped, for the person before the fire was Sir Edmund Orme. He stood there as I had seen him in the Indian room, looking at me with the expressionless attention which borrowed its sternness from his sombre distinction. I knew so much more about him now that I had to check a movement of recognition, an acknowledgment of his presence. When once I was aware of it, and that it lasted, the sense that we had company, Charlotte and I, quitted me; it was impressed on me on the contrary that I was more intensely alone with Miss Marden. She evidently saw nothing to look at, and I made a tremendous and very nearly successful effort to conceal from her that my own situation was different. I say “very nearly,” because she watched me an instant—while my words were arrested—in a way that made me fear she was going to say again, as she had said in the Indian room: “What on earth is the matter with you?”

  What the matter with me was I quickly told her, for the full knowledge of it rolled over me with the touching spectacle of her unconsciousness. It was touching that she became, in the presence of this extraordinary portent. What was portended, danger or sorrow, bliss or bane, was a minor question; all I saw, as she sat there, was that, innocent and charming, she was close to a horror, as she might have thought it, that happened to be veiled from her but that might at any moment be disclosed. I didn’t mind it now, as I found, but nothing was more possible than she should, and if it wasn’t curious and interesting it might easily be very dreadful. If I didn’t mind it for myself, as I afterwards saw, this was largely because I was so taken up with the idea of protecting her. My heart beat high with this idea, on the spot; I determined to do everything I could to keep her sense sealed. What I could do might have been very obscure to me if I had not, in all this, become more aware than of anything else that I loved her. The way to save her was to love her, and the way to love her was to tell her, now and here, that I did so. Sir Edmund Orme didn’t prevent me, especially as after a moment he turned his back to us and stood looking discreetly at the fire. At the end of another moment he leaned his head on his arm, against the chimneypiece, with an air of gradual dejection, like a spirit still more weary than discreet. Charlotte Marden was startled by what I said to her, and she jumped up to escape it; but she took no offence— my tenderness was too real. She only moved about the room with a deprecating murmur, and I was so busy following up any little advantage that I might have obtained that I didn’t notice in what manner Sir Edmund Orme disappeared. I only observed presently that he had gone. This made no difference—he had been so small a hindrance; I only remember being struck, suddenly, with something inexorable in the slow, sweet, sad headshake that Miss Marden gave me.

  “I don’t ask for an answer now,” I said; “I only want you to be sure—to know how much depends on it.”

  “Oh, I don’t want to give it to you, now or
ever!” she replied. “I hate the subject, please—I wish one could be let alone.” And then, as if I might have found something harsh in this irrepressible, artless cry of beauty beset, she added quickly, vaguely, kindly, as she left the room: “Thank you, thank you—thank you so much!”

  At dinner I could be generous enough to be glad, for her, that I was placed on the same side of the table with her, where she couldn’t see me. Her mother was nearly opposite to me, and just after we had sat down Mrs Marden gave me one long, deep look, in which all our strange communion was expressed. It meant of course “She has told me,” but it meant other things beside. At any rate I know what my answering look to her conveyed: “I’ve seen him again—I’ve seen him again!” This didn’t prevent Mrs Marden from treating her neighbours with her usual scrupulous blandness. After dinner, when, in the drawing-room, the men joined the ladies and I went straight up to her to tell her how I wished we could have some private conversation, she said immediately, in a low tone, looking down at her fan while she opened and shut it:

  “He’s here—he’s here.”

  “Here?” I looked round the room, but I was disappointed.

  “Look where she is,” said Mrs Marden, with just the faintest asperity. Charlotte was in fact not in the main saloon, but in an apartment into which it opened and which was known as the morning-room. I took a few steps and saw her, through a doorway, upright in the middle of the room, talking with three gentlemen whose backs were practically turned to me. For a moment my quest seemed vain; then I recognised that one of the gentlemen—the middle one—was Sir Edmund Orme. This time it was surprising that the others didn’t see him. Charlotte seemed to be looking straight at him, addressing her conversation to him. She saw me after an instant, however, and immediately turned her eyes away. I went back to her mother with an annoyed sense that the girl would think I was watching her, which would be unjust. Mrs Marden had found a small sofa—a little apart—and I sat down beside her. There were some questions I had so wanted to go into that I wished we were once more in the Indian room. I presently gathered, however, that our privacy was all-sufficient. We communicated so closely and completely now, and with such silent reciprocities, that it would in every circumstance be adequate.