by Herman Graf
“Oh, yes, he’s there,” I said; “and at about a quarter-past seven he was in the hall.”
“I knew it at the time, and I was so glad!”
“So glad?”
“That it was your affair, this time, and not mine. It’s a rest for me.”
“Did you sleep all the afternoon?” I asked.
“As I haven’t done for months. But how did you know that?”
“As you knew, I take it, that Sir Edmund was in the hall. We shall evidently each of us know things now—where the other is concerned.”
“Where he is concerned,” Mrs Marden amended. “It’s a blessing, the way you take it,” she added, with a long, mild sigh.
“I take it as a man who’s in love with your daughter.”
“Of course—of course.” Intense as I now felt my desire for the girl to be, I couldn’t help laughing a little at the tone of these words; and it led my companion immediately to say: “Otherwise you wouldn’t have seen him.”
“But every one doesn’t see him who’s in love with her, or there would be dozens.”
“They’re not in love with her as you are.”
“I can, of course, only speak for myself; and I found a moment, before dinner, to do so.”
“She told me immediately.”
“And have I any hope—any chance?”
“That’s what I long for, what I pray for.”
“Ah, how can I thank you enough?” I murmured.
“I believe it will all pass—if she loves you,” Mrs Marden continued.
“It will all pass?”
“We shall never see him again.”
“Oh, if she loves me I don’t care how often I see him!”
“Ah, you take it better than I could,” said my companion. “You have the happiness not to know—not to understand.”
“I don’t indeed. What on earth does he want?”
“He wants to make me suffer.” She turned her wan face upon me with this, and I saw now for the first time, fully, how perfectly, if this had been Sir Edmund Orme’s purpose, he had succeeded. “For what I did to him,” Mrs Marden explained.
“And what did you do to him?”
She looked at me a moment. “I killed him.” As I had seen him fifty yards away only five minutes before the words gave me a start. “Yes, I make you jump; be careful. He’s there still, but he killed himself. I broke his heart—he thought me awfully bad. We were to have been married, but I broke it off—just at the last. I saw some one I liked better; I had no reason but that. It wasn’t for interest, or money, or position, or anything of that sort. All those things were his. It was simply that I fell in love with Captain Marden. When I saw him I felt that I couldn’t marry anyone else. I wasn’t in love with Edmund Orme—my mother, my elder sister had brought it about. But he did love me. I told him I didn’t care—that I couldn’t, that I wouldn’t. I threw him over, and he took something, some abominable drug or draught that proved fatal. It was dreadful, it was horrible, he was found that way—he died in agony. I married Captain Marden, but not for five years. I was happy, perfectly happy; time obliterates. But when my husband died I began to see him.”
I had listened intently, but I wondered. “To see your husband?”
“Never, never that way, thank God! To see him, with Chartie— always with Chartie. The first time it nearly killed me—about seven years ago, when she first came out. Never when I’m by myself—only with her. Sometimes not for months, then every day for a week. I’ve tried everything to break the spell—doctors and régimes and climates; I’ve prayed to God on my knees. That day at Brighton, on the Parade with you, when you thought I was ill, that was the first for an age. And then, in the evening, when I knocked my tea over you, and the day you were at the door with Charlotte and I saw you from the window—each time he was there.”
“I see, I see.” I was more thrilled than I could say. “It’s an apparition like another.”
“Like another? Have you ever seen another?”
“No, I mean the sort of thing one has heard of. It’s tremendously interesting to encounter a case.”
“Do you call me a ‘case’?” Mrs Marden asked, with exquisite resentment.
“I mean myself.”
“Oh, you’re the right one!” she exclaimed. “I was right when I trusted you.”
“I’m devoutly grateful you did; but what made you do it?”
“I had thought the whole thing out—I had had time to in those dreadful years, while he was punishing me in my daughter.”
“Hardly that,” I objected, “if she never knew.”
“That has been my terror, that she will, from one occasion to another. I’ve an unspeakable dread of the effect on her.”
“She sha’n’t, she sha’n’t!” I declared, so loud that several people looked round. Mrs Marden made me get up, and I had no more talk with her that evening. The next day I told her I must take my departure from Tranton—it was neither comfortable nor considerate to remain as a rejected suitor. She was disconcerted, but she accepted my reasons, only saying to me out of her mournful eyes: ‘You’ll leave me alone then with my burden?’ It was of course understood between us that for many weeks to come there would be no discretion in ‘worrying poor Charlotte’: such were the terms in which, with odd feminine and maternal inconsistency, she alluded to an attitude on my part that she favoured. I was prepared to be heroically considerate, but it seemed to me that even this delicacy permitted me to say a word to Miss Marden before I went. I begged her, after breakfast, to take a turn with me on the terrace, and as she hesitated, looking at me distantly, I informed her that it was only to ask her a question and to say good-bye—I was leaving Tranton for her.
She came out with me, and we passed slowly round the house three or four times. Nothing is finer than this great airy platform, from which every look is a sweep of the country, with the sea on the furthest edge. It might have been that as we passed the windows we were conspicuous to our friends in the house, who would divine, sarcastically, why I was so significantly bolting. But I didn’t care; I only wondered whether they wouldn’t really this time make out Sir Edmund Orme, who joined us on one of our turns and strolled slowly on the other side of my companion. Of what transcendent essence he was composed I knew not; I have no theory about him (leaving that to others), any more than I have one about such or such another of my fellow-mortals whom I have elbowed in life. He was as positive, as individual, as ultimate a fact as any of these. Above all he was as respectable, as sensitive a fact; so that I should no more have thought of taking a liberty, of practising an experiment with him, of touching him, for instance, or speaking to him, since he set the example of silence, than I should have thought of committing any other social grossness. He had always, as I saw more fully later, the perfect propriety of his position—had always the appearance of being dressed and, in attitude and aspect, of comporting himself, as the occasion demanded. He looked strange, incontestably, but somehow he always looked right. I very soon came to attach an idea of beauty to his unmentionable presence, the beauty of an old story of love and pain. What I ended by feeling was that he was on my side, that he was watching over my interest, that he was looking to it that my heart shouldn’t be broken. Oh, he had taken it seriously, his own catastrophe—he had certainly proved that in his day. If poor Mrs Marden, as she told me, had thought it out, I also subjected the case to the finest analysis of which my intellect was capable. It was a case of retributive justice. The mother was to pay, in suffering, for the suffering she had inflicted, and as the disposition to jilt a lover might have been transmitted to the daughter, the daughter was to be watched, so that she might be made to suffer should she do an equal wrong. She might reproduce her mother in character as vividly as she did in face. On the day she should transgress, in other words, her eyes would be opened suddenly and unpitiedly to the ‘perfect presence’, which she would have to work as she could into her conception of a young lady’s universe. I had no great fe
ar for her, because I didn’t believe she was, in any cruel degree, a coquette. We should have a good deal of ground to get over before I, at least, should be in a position to be sacrificed by her. She couldn’t throw me over before she had made a little more of me.
The question I asked her on the terrace that morning was whether I might continue, during the winter, to come to Mrs Marden’s house. I promised not to come too often and not to speak to her for three months of the question I had raised the day before. She replied that I might do as I liked, and on this we parted.
I carried out the vow I had made her; I held my tongue for my three months. Unexpectedly to myself there were moments of this time when she struck me as capable of playing with a man. I wanted so to make her like me that I became subtle and ingenious, wonderfully alert, patiently diplomatic. Sometimes I thought I had earned my reward, brought her to the point of saying: ‘Well, well, you’re the best of them all—you may speak to me now.’ Then there was a greater blankness than ever in her beauty, and on certain days a mocking light in her eyes, of which the meaning seemed to be: “If you don’t take care, I will accept you, to have done with you the more effectually.” Mrs Marden was a great help to me simply by believing in me, and I valued her faith all the more that it continued even though there was a sudden intermission of the miracle that had been wrought for me. After our visit to Tranton Sir Edmund Orme gave us a holiday, and I confess it was at first a disappointment to me. I felt less designated, less connected with Charlotte. “Oh, don’t cry till you’re out of the wood,” her mother said; “he has let me off sometimes for six months. He’ll break out again when you least expect it—he knows what he’s about.” For her these weeks were happy, and she was wise enough not to talk about me to the girl. She was so good as to assure me that I was taking the right way, that I looked as if I felt secure and that in the long run women give way to that. She had known them do it even when the man was a fool for looking so—or was a fool on any terms. For herself she felt it to be a good time, a sort of St Martin’s summer of the soul. She was better than she had been for years, and she had me to thank for it. The sense of visitation was light upon her—she wasn’t in anguish every time she looked round. Charlotte contradicted me very often, but she contradicted herself still more. That winter was a wonder of mildness, and we often sat out in the sun. I walked up and down with Charlotte, and Mrs Marden, sometimes on a bench, sometimes in a bath-chair, waited for us and smiled at us as we passed. I always looked out for a sign in her face—“He’s with you, he’s with you” (she would see him before I should), but nothing came; the season had brought us also a sort of spiritual softness. Toward the end of April the air was so like June that, meeting my two friends one night at some Brighton sociability—an evening party with amateur music—I drew Miss Marden unresistingly out upon a balcony to which a window in one of the rooms stood open. The night was close and thick, the stars were dim, and below us, under the cliff, we heard the regular rumble of the sea. We listened to it a little and we heard mixed with it, from within the house, the sound of a violin accompanied by a piano—a performance which had been our pretext for passing out.
“Do you like me a little better?” I asked, abruptly, after a minute. “Could you listen to me again?”
I had no sooner spoken than she laid her hand quickly, with a certain force, on my arm. “Hush!—isn’t there some one there?” She was looking into the gloom of the far end of the balcony. This balcony ran the whole width of the house, a width very great in the best of the old houses at Brighton. We were lighted a little by the open window behind us, but the other windows, curtained within, left the darkness undiminished, so that I made out but dimly the figure of a gentleman standing there and looking at us. He was in evening dress, like a guest—I saw the vague shine of his white shirt and the pale oval of his face—and he might perfectly have been a guest who had stepped out in advance of us to take the air. Miss Marden took him for one at first—then evidently, even in a few seconds, she saw that the intensity of his gaze was unconventional. What else she saw I couldn’t determine; I was too taken up with my own impression to do more than feel the quick contact of her uneasiness. My own impression was in fact the strongest of sensations, a sensation of horror; for what could the thing mean but that the girl at last saw? I heard her give a sudden, gasping “Ah!” and move quickly into the house. It was only afterwards that I knew that I myself had had a totally new emotion—my horror passing into anger, and my anger into a stride along the balcony with a gesture of reprobation. The case was simplified to the vision of a frightened girl whom I loved. I advanced to vindicate her security, but I found nothing there to meet me. It was either all a mistake or Sir Edmund Orme had vanished.
I followed Miss Marden immediately, but there were symptoms of confusion in the drawing-room when I passed in. A lady had fainted, the music had stopped; there was a shuffling of chairs and a pressing forward. The lady was not Charlotte, as I feared, but Mrs Marden, who had suddenly been taken ill. I remember the relief with which I learned this, for to see Charlotte stricken would have been anguish, and her mother’s condition gave a channel to her agitation. It was of course all a matter for the people of the house and for the ladies, and I could have no share in attending to my friends or in conducting them to their carriage. Mrs Marden revived and insisted on going home, after which I uneasily withdrew.
I called the next morning to ask about her and was informed that she was better, but when I asked if Miss Marden would see me the message sent down was that it was impossible. There was nothing for me to do all day but to roam about with a beating heart. But toward evening I received a line in pencil, brought by hand—‘Please come; mother wishes you.’ Five minutes afterward I was at the door again and ushered into the drawing-room. Mrs Marden lay upon the sofa, and as soon as I looked at her I saw the shadow of death in her face. But the first thing she said was that she was better, ever so much better; her poor old heart had been behaving queerly again, but now it was quiet. She gave me her hand and I bent over her with my eyes in hers, and in this way I was able to read what she didn’t speak—‘I’m really very ill, but appear to take what I say exactly as I say it.’ Charlotte stood there beside her, looking not frightened now, but intensely grave, and not meeting my eyes. “She has told me—she has told me!” her mother went on.
“She has told you?” I stared from one of them to the other, wondering if Mrs Marden meant that the girl had spoken to her of the circumstances on the balcony.
“That you spoke to her again—that you’re admirably faithful.”
I felt a thrill of joy at this; it showed me that that memory had been uppermost, and also that Charlotte had wished to say the thing that would soothe her mother most, not the thing that would alarm her. Yet I now knew, myself, as well as if Mrs Marden had told me, that she knew and had known at the moment what her daughter had seen. “I spoke—I spoke, but she gave me no answer,” I said.
“She will now, won’t you, Chartie? I want it so, I want it!” the poor lady murmured, with ineffable wistfulness.
“You’re very good to me,” Charlotte said to me, seriously and sweetly, looking fixedly on the carpet. There was something different in her, different from all the past. She had recognised something, she felt a coercion. I could see that she was trembling.
“Ah, if you would let me show you how good I can be!” I exclaimed, holding out my hands to her. As I uttered the words I was touched with the knowledge that something had happened. A form had constituted itself on the other side of the bed, and the form leaned over Mrs Marden. My whole being went forth into a mute prayer that Charlotte shouldn’t see it and that I should be able to betray nothing. The impulse to glance toward Mrs Marden was even stronger than the involuntary movement of taking in Sir Edmund Orme; but I could resist even that, and Mrs Marden was perfectly still. Charlotte got up to give me her hand, and with the definite act she saw. She gave, with a shriek, one stare of dismay, and another sound, like a wail
of one of the lost, fell at the same instant on my ear. But I had already sprung toward the girl to cover her, to veil her face. She had already thrown herself into my arms. I held her there a moment—bending over her, given up to her, feeling each of her throbs with my own and not knowing which was which; then, all of a sudden, coldly, I gathered that we were alone. She released herself. The figure beside the sofa had vanished; but Mrs Marden lay in her place with closed eyes, with something in her stillness that gave us both another terror. Charlotte expressed it in the cry of “Mother, mother!” with which she flung herself down. I fell on my knees beside her. Mrs Marden had passed away.
Was the sound I heard when Chartie shrieked—the other and still more tragic sound I mean—the despairing cry of the poor lady’s death-shock or the articulate sob (it was like a waft from a great tempest), of the exorcised and pacified spirit? Possibly the latter, for that was, mercifully, the last of Sir Edmund Orme.
THE HORLA
Guy de Maupassant
Guy de Maupassant wrote seven novels, of which the best known are Bel Ami and Pierre et Jean. He is considered to be one of the most distinguished writers of short stories and his literary output was enormous. He was a veteran of the Franco-Prussian War. He unfortunately died of syphilis at the age of forty-three.
* * *
MAY 8. What a lovely day! I have spent all the morning lying in the grass in front of my house, under the enormous plane tree that shades the whole of it. I like this part of the country and I like to live here because I am attached to it by old associations, by those deep and delicate roots which attach a man to the soil on which his ancestors were born and died, which attach him to the ideas and usages of the place as well as to the food, to local expressions, to the peculiar twang of the peasants, to the smell of the soil, of the villages and of the atmosphere itself. I love my house in which I grew up. From my windows I can see the Seine which flows alongside my garden, on the other side of the high road, almost through my grounds, the great and wide Seine, which goes to Rouen and Havre, and is covered with boats passing to and fro.
