Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  The answer came, “Look on the floor under your dressing-table!”

  “Well, if I find it there,” the girl addressed the company, “I’m a spiritualist from this time forth.” And she came back to her place, where she remained for some time explaining to those near how she had lately lost her ring and suspected her maid, whom she had dismissed.

  Upon the whole, the effect was serious. The women, having once started, needed no more urging. One after another they confronted and questioned the oracle with increasing sincerity.

  Miss Macroyd asked Verrian, “Hadn’t you better take your chance and stop this flow of fatuity, Mr. Verrian?”

  “I’m afraid I should be fatuous, too,” he said. “But you?”

  “Oh, thank you, I don’t believe in ghosts, though this seems to be a very pretty one — very graceful, I mean. I suppose a graceful woman would be graceful even when a disembodied spirit. I should think she would be getting a little tried with all this questioning; but perhaps we’re only reading the fatigue into her. The ghost may be merely overdone.”

  “It might easily be that,” Verrian assented.

  “Oh, may I ask it something now?” a girl’s voice appealed to Bushwick. It was the voice of that Miss Andrews who had spoken first, and first refused to question the ghost. She was the youngest of Mrs. Westangle’s guests, and Verrian had liked her, with a sense of something precious in the prolongation of a child’s unconsciousness into the consciousness of girlhood which he found in her. She was always likelier than not to say the thing she thought and felt, whether it was silly and absurd, or whether, as also happened, there was a touch of inspired significance in it, as there is apt to be in the talk of children. She was laughed at, but she was liked, and the freshness of her soul was pleasant to the girls who were putting on the world as hard as they could. She could be trusted to do and say the unexpected. But she was considered a little morbid, and certainly she had an exaltation of the nerves that was at times almost beyond her control.

  “Oh, dear!” Miss Macroyd whispered. “What is that strange simpleton going to do, I wonder?”

  Verrian did not feel obliged to answer a question not addressed to him, but he, too, wondered and doubted.

  The girl, having got her courage together, fluttered with it from her place round to the ghost’s in a haste that expressed a fear that it might escape her if she delayed to put it to the test. The phantom was already there, as if it had waited her in the curiosity that followed her. They were taking each other seriously, the girl and the ghost, and if the ghost had been a veridical phantom, in which she could have believed with her whole soul, the girl could not have entreated it more earnestly, more simply.

  She bent forward, in her slim, tall figure, with her hands outstretched, and with her tender voice breaking at times in her entreaty. “Oh, I don’t know how to begin,” she said, quite as if she and the phantom were alone together, and she had forgotten its supernatural awfulness in a sense of its human quality. “But you will understand, won’t you! You’ll think it very strange, and it is very unlike the others; but if I’m going to be serious—”

  The white figure stood motionless; but Verrian interpreted its quiet as a kindly intelligence, and the girl made a fresh start in a note a little more piteous than before. “It’s about the — the truth. Do you think if sometimes we don’t tell it exactly, but we wish we had very, very much, it will come round somehow the same as if we had told it?”

  “I don’t understand,” the phantom answered. “Say it again — or differently.”

  “Can our repentance undo it, or make the falsehood over into the truth?”

  “Never!” the ghost answered, with a passion that thrilled to Verrian’s heart.

  “Oh, dear!” the girl said; and then, as if she had been going to continue, she stopped.

  “You’ve still got your half-question, Miss Andrews,” Bushwick interposed.

  “Even if we didn’t mean it to deceive harmfully?” the girl pursued. “If it was just on impulse, something we couldn’t seem to help, and we didn’t see it in its true light at the time—”

  The ghost made no answer. It stood motionless.

  “It is offended,” Bushwick said, without knowing the Shakespearian words. “You’ve asked it three times half a question, Miss Andrews. Now, Mr. Verrian, it’s your turn. You can ask it just one-quarter of a question. Miss Andrews has used up the rest of your share.”

  Verrian rose awkwardly and stood a long moment before his chair. Then he dropped back again, saying, dryly, “I don’t think I want to ask it anything.”

  The phantom sank straight down as if sinking through the floor, but lay there like a white shawl trailed along the bottom of the dark curtain.

  “And is that all?” Miss Macroyd asked Verrian. “I was just getting up my courage to go forward. But now, I suppose—”

  “Oh, dear!” Miss Andrews called out. “Perhaps it’s fainted. Hadn’t we better—”

  There were formless cries from the women, and the men made a crooked rush forward, in which Verrian did not join. He remained where he had risen, with Miss Macroyd beside him.

  “Perhaps it’s only a coup de theatre!” she said, with her laugh. “Better wait.”

  Bushwick was gathering the prostrate figure up. “She has fainted!” he called. “Get some water, somebody!”

  XIX.

  The early Monday morning train which brought Verrian up to town was so very early that he could sit down to breakfast with his mother only a little later than their usual hour.

  She had called joyfully to him from her room, when she heard the rattling of his key as he let himself into the apartment, and, after an exchange of greetings, shouted back and forth before they saw each other, they could come at once to the history of his absence over their coffee. “You must have had a very good time, to stay so long. After you wrote that you would not be back Thursday, I expected it would be Saturday till I got your telegram. But I’m glad you stayed. You certainly needed the rest.”

  “Yes, if those things are ever a rest.” He looked down at his cup while he stirred the coffee in it, and she studied his attitude, since she could not see his face fully, for the secret of any vital change that might have come upon him. It could be that in the interval since she had seen him he had seen the woman who was to take him from her. She was always preparing herself for that, knowing that it must come almost as certainly as death, and knowing that with all her preparation she should not be ready for it. “I’ve got rather a long story to tell you and rather a strange story,” he said, lifting his head and looking round, but not so impersonally that his mother did not know well enough to say to the Swedish serving-woman:

  “You needn’t stay, Margit. I’ll give Mr. Philip his breakfast. Well!” she added, when they were alone.

  “Well,” he returned, with a smile that she knew he was forcing, “I have seen the girl that wrote that letter.”

  “Not Jerusha Brown?”

  “Not Jerusha Brown, but the girl all the same.”

  “Now go on, Philip, and don’t miss a single word!” she commanded him, with an imperious breathlessness. “You know I won’t hurry you or interrupt you, but you must — you really must-tell me everything. Don’t leave out the slightest detail.”

  “I won’t,” he said. But she was aware, from time to time, that she was keeping her word better than he was keeping his, in his account of meeting Miss Shirley and all the following events.

  “You can imagine,” he said, “what a sensation the swooning made, and the commotion that followed it.”

  “Yes, I can imagine that,” she answered. But she was yet so faithful that she would not ask him to go on.

  He continued, unasked, “I don’t know just how, now, to account for its coming into my head that it was Miss Andrews who was my unknown correspondent. I suppose I’ve always unconsciously expected to meet that girl, and Miss Andrews’s hypothetical case was psychologically so parallel—”

 
; “Yes, yes!”

  “And I’ve sometimes been afraid that I judged it too harshly — that it was a mere girlish freak without any sort of serious import.”

  “I was sometimes afraid so, Philip. But—”

  “And I don’t believe now that the hypothetical case brought any intolerable stress of conscience upon Miss Shirley, or that she fainted from any cause but exhaustion from the general ordeal. She was still weak from the sickness she had been through — too weak to bear the strain of the work she had taken up. Of course, the catastrophe gave the whole surface situation away, and I must say that those rather banal young people behaved very humanely about it. There was nothing but interest of the nicest kind, and, if she is going on with her career, it will be easy enough for her to find engagements after this.”

  “Why shouldn’t she go on?” his mother asked, with a suspicion which she kept well out of sight.

  “Well, as well as she could explain afterwards, the catastrophe took her work out of the category of business and made her acceptance in it a matter of sentiment.”

  “She explained it to you herself?”

  “Yes, the general sympathy had penetrated to Mrs. Westangle, though I don’t say that she had been more than negatively indifferent to Miss Shirley’s claim on her before. As it was, she sent for me to her room the next morning, and I found Miss Shirley alone there. She said Mrs. Westangle would be down in a moment.”

  Now, indeed, Mrs. Verrian could not govern herself from saying, “I don’t like it, Philip.”

  “I knew you wouldn’t. It was what I said to myself at the time. You were so present with me that I seemed to have you there chaperoning the interview.” His mother shrugged, and he went on: “She said she wished to tell me something first, and then she said, ‘I want to do it while I have the courage, if it’s courage; perhaps it’s just desperation. I am Jerusha Brown.’”

  His mother began, “But you said—” and then stopped herself.

  “I know that I said she wasn’t, but she explained, while I sat there rather mum, that there was really another girl, and that the other girl’s name was really Jerusha Brown. She was the daughter of the postmaster in the village where Miss Shirley was passing the summer. In fact, Miss Shirley was boarding in the postmaster’s family, and the girls had become very friendly. They were reading my story together, and talking about it, and trying to guess how it would come out, just as the letter said, and they simultaneously hit upon the notion of writing to me. It seemed to them that it would be a good joke — I’m not defending it, mother, and I must say Miss Shirley didn’t defend it, either — to work upon my feelings in the way they tried, and they didn’t realize what they had done till Armiger’s letter came. It almost drove them wild, she said; but they had a lucid interval, and they took the letter to the girl’s father and told him what they had done. He was awfully severe with them for their foolishness, and said they must write to Armiger at once and confess the fact. Then they said they had written already, and showed him the second letter, and explained they had decided to let Miss Brawn write it in her person alone for the reason she gave in it. But Miss Shirley told him she was ready to take her full share of the blame, and, if anything came of it, she authorized him to put the whole blame on her.”

  Verrian made a pause which his mother took for invitation or permission to ask, “And was he satisfied with that?”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t, and it’s only just to Miss Shirley to say that she wasn’t, either. She didn’t try to justify it to me; she merely said she was so frightened that she couldn’t have done anything. She may have realized more than the Brown girl what they had done.”

  “The postmaster, did he regard it as anything worse than foolishness?”

  “I don’t believe he did. At any rate, he was satisfied with what his daughter had done in owning up.”

  “Well, I always liked that girl’s letter. And did they show him your letter?”

  “It seems that they did.”

  “And what did he say about that?”

  “I suppose, what I deserved. Miss Shirley wouldn’t say, explicitly. He wanted to answer it, but they wouldn’t let him. I don’t know but I should feel better if he had. I haven’t been proud of that letter of mine as time has gone on, mother; I think I behaved very narrow-mindedly, very personally in it.”

  “You behaved justly.”

  “Justly? I thought you had your doubts of that. At any rate, I had when it came to hearing the girl accusing herself as if she had been guilty of some monstrous wickedness, and I realized that I had made her feel so.”

  “She threw herself on your pity!”

  “No, she didn’t, mother. Don’t make it impossible for me to tell you just how it was.”

  “I won’t. Go on.”

  “I don’t say she was manly about it; that couldn’t be, but she was certainly not throwing herself on my pity, unless — unless—”

  “What?”

  “Unless you call it so for her to say that she wanted to own up to me, because she could have no rest till she had done so; she couldn’t put it behind her till she had acknowledged it; she couldn’t work; she couldn’t get well.”

  He saw his mother trying to consider it fairly, and in response he renewed his own resolution not to make himself the girl’s advocate with her, but to continue the dispassionate historian of the case. At the same time his memory was filled with the vision of how she had done and said the things he was telling, with what pathos, with what grace, with what beauty in her appeal. He saw the tears that came into her eyes at times and that she indignantly repressed as she hurried on in the confession which she was voluntarily making, for there was no outward stress upon her to say anything. He felt again the charm of the situation, the sort of warmth and intimacy, but he resolved not to let that feeling offset the impartiality of his story.

  “No, I don’t say she threw herself on your mercy,” his mother said, finally. “She needn’t have told you anything.”

  “Except for the reason she gave — that she couldn’t make a start for herself till she had done so. And she has got her own way to make; she is poor. Of course, you may say her motive was an obsession, and not a reason.”

  “There’s reality in it, whatever it is; it’s a genuine motive,” Mrs. Verrian conceded.

  “I think so,” Verrian said, in a voice which he tried to keep from sounding too grateful.

  Apparently his mother did not find it so. She asked, “What had been the matter with her, did she say?”

  “In her long sickness? Oh! A nervous fever of some sort.”

  “From worrying about that experience?”

  Verrian reluctantly admitted, “She said it made her want to die. I don’t suppose we can quite realize—”

  “We needn’t believe everything she said to realize that she suffered. But girls exaggerate their sufferings. I suppose you told her not to think of it any more?”

  Verrian gave an odd laugh. “Well, not unconditionally. I tried to give her my point of view. And I stipulated that she should tell Jerusha Brown all about it, and keep her from having a nervous fever, too.”

  “That was right. You must see that even cowardice couldn’t excuse her selfishness in letting that girl take all the chances.”

  “And I’m afraid I was not very unselfish myself in my stipulations,” Verrian said, with another laugh. “I think that I wanted to stand well with the postmaster.”

  There was a note of cynical ease in this which Mrs. Verrian found morally some octaves lower than the pitch of her son’s habitual seriousness in what concerned himself, but she could not make it a censure to him. “And you were able to reassure her, so that she needn’t think of it any more?”

  “What would you have wished me to do?” he returned, dryly. “Don’t you think she had suffered enough?”

  “Oh, in this sort of thing it doesn’t seem the question of suffering. If there’s wrong done the penalty doesn’t right it.”

  The
notion struck Verrian’s artistic sense. “That’s true. That would make the ‘donnee’ of a strong story. Or a play. It’s a drama of fate. It’s Greek. But I thought we lived under another dispensation.”

  “Will she try to get more of the kind of thing she was doing for Mrs. Westangle at once? Or has she some people?”

  “No; only friends, as I understand.”

  “Where is she from? Up country?”

  “No, she’s from the South.”

  “I don’t like Southerners!”

  “I know you don’t, mother. But you must honor the way they work and get on when they come North and begin doing for themselves. Besides, Miss Shirley’s family went South after the war—”

  “Oh, not even a REAL Southerner!”

  “Mother!”

  “I know! I’m not fair. I ought to beg her pardon. And I ought to be glad it’s all over. Shall you see her again?”

  “It might happen. But I don’t know how or when. We parted friends, but we parted strangers, so far as any prevision of the future is concerned,” Verrian said.

  His mother drew a long breath, which she tried to render inaudible. “And the girl that asked her the strange questions, did you see her again?”

  “Oh yes. She had a curious fascination. I should like to tell you about her. Do you think there’s such a thing as a girl’s being too innocent?”

  “It isn’t so common as not being innocent enough.”

  “But it’s more difficult?”

  “I hope you’ll never find it so, my son,” Mrs. Verrian said. And for the first time she was intentionally personal. “Go on.”

  “About Miss Andrews?”

  “Whichever you please.”

  “She waylaid me in the afternoon, as I was coming home from a walk, and wanted to talk with me about Miss Shirley.”

  “I suppose Miss Shirley was the day’s heroine after what had happened?”