"You saw her?"
"I saw a woman come in and sit down at the table, and I wondered why no
one served her. I saw her quite distinctly."
"A small woman, thin and pale, in a grey dress?"
"She was so vague and--and misty, you know what I mean, that it is hard
to describe her; but I should know her again anywhere. She wore her hair
parted and drawn down over her ears. It was very dark and fine--as fine
as spun silk."
We were speaking in low voices, and unconsciously we had moved closer
together while my idle hands left the tea things.
"Then you know," she said earnestly, "that she really comes--that I am
not out of my mind--that it is not an hallucination?"
"I know that I saw her. I would swear to it. But doesn't Mr.
Vanderbridge see her also?"
"Not as we see her. He thinks that she is in his mind only." Then after
an uncomfortable silence, she added suddenly, "She is really a thought,
you know. She is his thought of her--but he doesn't know that she is
visible to the rest of us."
"And he brings her back by thinking of her?"
She leaned nearer while a quiver passed over her features and the flush
deepened in her cheeks. "That is the only way she comes back--the only
way she has the power to come back--as a thought. There are months and
months when she leaves us in peace because he is thinking of other
things, but of late, since his illness, she has been with him almost
constantly." A sob broke from her, and she buried her face in her hands.
"I suppose she is always trying to come--only she is too vague--and she
hasn't any form that we can see except when he thinks of her as she used
to look when she was alive. His thought of her is like that, hurt and
tragic and revengeful. You see, he feels that he ruined her life because
she died when the child was coming--a month before it would have been
born."
"And if he were to see her differently, would she change? Would she
cease to be revengeful if he stopped thinking her so?"
"God only knows. I've wondered and wondered how I might move her to
pity."
"Then you feel that she is really there? That she exists outside of his
mind?"
"How can I tell? What do any of us know of the world beyond? She exists
as much as I exist to you or you to me. Isn't thought all that there
is--all that we know?"
This was deeper than I could follow; but in order not to appear stupid,
I murmured sympathetically.
"And does she make him unhappy when she comes?"
"She is killing him--and me. I believe that is why she does it."
"Are you sure that she could stay away? When he thinks of her isn't she
obliged to come back?"
"Oh, I've asked that question over and over! In spite of his calling her
so unconsciously, I believe she comes of her own will. I have always the
feeling--it has never left me for an instant--that she could appear
differently if she would. I have studied her for years until I know her
like a book, and though she is only an apparition, I am perfectly
positive that she wills evil to us both. Don't you think he would change
that if he could? Don't you think he would make her kind instead of
vindictive if he had the power?"
"But if he could remember her as loving and tender?"
"I don't know. I give it up--but it is killing me."
It _was_ killing her. As the days passed I began to realize that she had
spoken the truth. I watched her bloom fade slowly and her lovely
features grow pinched and thin like the features of a starved person.
The harder she fought the apparition, the more I saw that the battle was
a losing one, and that she was only wasting her strength. So impalpable
yet so pervasive was the enemy that it was like fighting a poisonous
odour. There was nothing to wrestle with, and yet there was everything.
The struggle was wearing her out--was, as she had said, actually
"killing her"; but the physician who dosed her daily with drugs--there
was need now of a physician--had not the faintest idea of the malady he
was treating. In those dreadful days I think that even Mr. Vanderbridge
hadn't a suspicion of the truth. The past was with him so constantly--he
was so steeped in the memories of it that the present was scarcely more
than a dream to him. It was, you see, a reversal of the natural order of
things; the thought had become more vivid to his perceptions than any
object. The phantom had been victorious so far, and he was like a man
recovering from the effects of a narcotic. He was only half awake, only
half alive to the events through which he lived and the people who
surrounded him. Oh, I realize that I am telling my story badly!--that I
am slurring over the significant interludes! My mind has dealt so long
with external details that I have almost forgotten the words that
express invisible things. Though the phantom in the house was more real
to me than the bread I ate or the floor on which I trod, I can give you
no impression of the atmosphere in which we lived day after day--of the
suspense, of the dread of something we could not define, of the brooding
horror that seemed to lurk in the shadows of the firelight, of the
feeling always, day and night, that some unseen person was watching us.
How Mrs. Vanderbridge stood it without losing her mind, I have never
known; and even now I am not sure that she could have kept her reason if
the end had not come when it did. That I accidentally brought it about
is one of the things in my life I am most thankful to remember.
It was an afternoon in late winter, and I had just come up from
luncheon, when Mrs. Vanderbridge asked me to empty an old desk in one of
the upstairs rooms. "I am sending all the furniture in that room away,"
she said, "it was bought in a bad period, and I want to clear it out and
make room for the lovely things we picked up in Italy. There is nothing
in the desk worth saving except some old letters from Mr. Vanderbridge's
mother before her marriage."
I was glad that she could think of anything so practical as furniture,
and it was with relief that I followed her into the dim, rather musty
room over the library, where the windows were all tightly closed. Years
ago, Hopkins had once told me, the first Mrs. Vanderbridge had used this
room for a while, and after her death her husband had been in the habit
of shutting himself up alone here in the evenings. This, I inferred, was
the secret reason why my employer was sending the furniture away. She
had resolved to clear the house of every association with the past.
For a few minutes we sorted the letters in the drawers of the desk, and
then, as I expected, Mrs. Vanderbridge became suddenly bored by the task
she had undertaken. She was subject to these nervous reactions, and I
was prepared for them even when they seized her so spasmodically. I
remember that she was in the very act of glancing over an old letter
when she rose impatiently, tossed it into the fire unread, and picked up
a magazine she had thrown down on a chair.
"Go over them by yourself, Miss Wrenn," she said, and it was
characteristic of her nature that she should assume my trustworthiness.
"If anything seems worth saving you can file it--but I'd rather die than
have to wade through all this."
They were mostly personal letters, and while I went on, carefully filing
them, I thought how absurd it was of people to preserve so many papers
that were entirely without value. Mr. Vanderbridge I had imagined to be
a methodical man, and yet the disorder of the desk produced a painful
effect on my systematic temperament. The drawers were filled with
letters evidently unsorted, for now and then I came upon a mass of
business receipts and acknowledgements crammed in among wedding
invitations or letters from some elderly lady, who wrote interminable
pale epistles in the finest and most feminine of Italian hands. That a
man of Mr. Vanderbridge's wealth and position should have been so
careless about his correspondence amazed me until I recalled the dark
hints Hopkins had dropped in some of her midnight conversations. Was it
possible that he had actually lost his reason for months after the death
of his first wife, during that year when he had shut himself alone with
her memory? The question was still in my mind when my eyes fell on the
envelope in my hand, and I saw that it was addressed to Mrs. Roger
Vanderbridge. So this explained, in a measure at least, the carelessness
and the disorder! The desk was not his, but hers, and after her death he
had used it only during those desperate months when he barely opened a
letter. What he had done in those long evenings when he sat alone here
it was beyond me to imagine. Was it any wonder that the brooding should
have permanently unbalanced his mind?
At the end of an hour I had sorted and filed the papers, with the
intention of asking Mrs. Vanderbridge if she wished me to destroy the
ones that seemed to be unimportant. The letters she had instructed me to
keep had not come to my hand, and I was about to give up the search for
them, when, in shaking the lock of one of the drawers, the door of a
secret compartment fell open and I discovered a dark object, which
crumbled and dropped apart when I touched it. Bending nearer, I saw that
the crumbled mass had once been a bunch of flowers, and that a streamer
of purple ribbon still held together the frail structure of wire and
stems. In this drawer some one had hidden a sacred treasure, and moved
by a sense of romance and adventure, I gathered the dust tenderly in
tissue paper, and prepared to take it downstairs to Mrs. Vanderbridge.
It was not until then that some letters tied loosely together with a
silver cord caught my eyes, and while I picked them up, I remember
thinking that they must be the ones for which I had been looking so
long. Then, as the cord broke in my grasp and I gathered the letters
from the lid of the desk, a word or two flashed back at me through the
torn edges of the envelopes, and I realized that they were love letters
written, I surmised, some fifteen years ago, by Mr. Vanderbridge to his
first wife.
"It may hurt her to see them," I thought, "but I don't dare destroy
them. There is nothing I can do except give them to her."
As I left the room, carrying the letters and the ashes of the flowers,
the idea of taking them to the husband instead of to the wife, flashed
through my mind. Then--I think it was some jealous feeling about the
phantom that decided me--I quickened my steps to a run down the
staircase.
"They would bring her back. He would think of her more than ever," I
told myself, "so he shall never see them. He shall never see them if I
can prevent it." I believe it occurred to me that Mrs. Vanderbridge
would be generous enough to give them to him--she was capable of rising
above her jealousy, I knew--but I determined that she shouldn't do it
until I had reasoned it out with her. "If anything on earth would bring
back the Other One for good, it would be his seeing these old letters,"
I repeated as I hastened down the hall.
Mrs. Vanderbridge was lying on the couch before the fire, and I noticed
at once that she had been crying. The drawn look in her sweet face went
to my heart, and I felt that I would do anything in the world to comfort
her. Though she had a book in her hand, I could see that she had not
been reading. The electric lamp on the table by her side was already
lighted, leaving the rest of the room in shadow, for it was a grey day
with a biting edge of snow in the air. It was all very charming in the
soft light; but as soon as I entered I had a feeling of oppression that
made me want to run out into the wind. If you have ever lived in a
haunted house--a house pervaded by an unforgettable past--you will
understand the sensation of melancholy that crept over me the minute the
shadows began to fall. It was not in myself--of this I am sure, for I
have naturally a cheerful temperament--it was in the space that
surrounded us and the air we breathed.
I explained to her about the letters, and then, kneeling on the rug in
front of her, I emptied the dust of the flowers into the fire. There
was, though I hate to confess it, a vindictive pleasure in watching it
melt into the flames and at the moment I believe I could have burned the
apparition as thankfully. The more I saw of the Other One, the more I
found myself accepting Hopkins' judgment of her. Yes, her behaviour,
living and dead, proved that she was not "a good sort."
My eyes were still on the flames when a sound from Mrs.
Vanderbridge--half a sigh, half a sob--made me turn quickly and look up
at her.
"But this isn't his handwriting," she said in a puzzled tone. "They are
love letters, and they are to her--but they are not from him." For a
moment or two she was silent, and I heard the pages rustle in her hands
as she turned them impatiently. "They are not from him," she repeated
presently, with an exultant ring in her voice. "They are written after
her marriage, but they are from another man." She was as sternly tragic
as an avenging fate. "She wasn't faithful to him while she lived. She
wasn't faithful to him even while he was hers--"
With a spring I had risen from my knees and was bending over her.
"Then you can save him from her. You can win him back? You have only to
show him the letters, and he will believe."
"Yes, I have only to show him the letters." She was looking beyond me
into the dusky shadows of the firelight, as if she saw the Other One
standing there. "I have only to show him the letters," I knew now that
she was not speaking to me, "and he will believe."
"Her power over him will be broken," I cried out. "He will think of her
differently. Oh, don't you see? Can't you see? It is the only way to
make him think of her differently. It is the only way to break for ever
the thought that draws her back to him."
"Yes, I see, it is the only way," she said slowly; and the words were
still on her lips when the door opened and Mr. Vanderbridge entered.
"I came for a cup of tea," he began, and added with playful tenderness,
"What is the only way?"
It was the crucial moment, I realized--it was the hour of destiny for
these two--and while he sank wearily into a chair, I looked imploringly
at his wife and then at the letters lying scattered loosely about her.
If I had had my will I should have flung them at him with a violence
which would have startled him out of his lethargy. Violence, I felt was
what he needed--violence, a storm, tears, reproaches--all the things he
would never get from his wife.
For a minute or two she sat there, with the letters before her, and
watched him with her thoughtful and tender gaze. I knew from her face,
so lovely and yet so sad, that she was looking again at invisible
things--at the soul of the man she loved, not at the body. She saw him,
detached and spiritualized, and she saw also the Other One--for while we
waited I became slowly aware of the apparition in the firelight--of the
white face and the cloudy hair and the look of animosity and bitterness
in the eyes. Never before had I been so profoundly convinced of the
malignant will veiled by that thin figure. It was as if the visible form
were only a spiral of grey smoke covering a sinister purpose.
"The only way," said Mrs. Vanderbridge, "is to fight fairly even when
one fights evil." Her voice was like a bell, and as she spoke, she rose
from the couch and stood there in her glowing beauty confronting the
pale ghost of the past. There was a light about her that was almost
unearthly--the light of triumph. The radiance of it blinded me for an
instant. It was like a flame, clearing the atmosphere of all that was
evil, of all that was poisonous and deadly. She was looking directly at
the phantom, and there was no hate in her voice--there was only a great
pity, a great sorrow and sweetness.
"I can't fight you that way," she said, and I knew that for the first
time she had swept aside subterfuge and evasion, and was speaking
straight to the presence before her. "After all, you are dead and I am
living, and I cannot fight you that way. I give up everything. I give
him back to you. Nothing is mine that I cannot win and keep fairly.
Nothing is mine that belongs really to you."
Then, while Mr. Vanderbridge rose, with a start of fear, and came
towards her, she bent quickly, and flung the letters into the fire. When
he would have stooped to gather the unburned pages, her lovely flowing
body curved between his hands and the flames; and so transparent, so
ethereal she looked, that I saw--or imagined that I saw--the firelight
shine through her. "The only way, my dear, is the right way," she said
softly.
The next instant--I don't know to this day how or when it began--I was
aware that the apparition had drawn nearer, and that the dread and fear,
the evil purpose, were no longer a part of her. I saw her clearly for a
moment--saw her as I had never seen her before--young and gentle
and--yes, this is the only word for it--loving. It was just as if a
curse had turned into a blessing, for, while she stood there, I had a
curious sensation of being enfolded in a kind of spiritual glow and
comfort--only words are useless to describe the feeling because it
wasn't in the least like anything else I had ever known in my life. It
was light without heat, glow without light--and yet it was none of these
things. The nearest I can come to it is to call it a sense of
blessedness--of blessedness that made you at peace with everything you
had once hated.
Not until afterwards did I realize that it was the victory of good over
evil. Not until afterwards did I discover that Mrs. Vanderbridge had
triumphed over the past in the only way that she could triumph. She had
won, not by resisting, but by accepting, not by violence, but by
gentleness, not by grasping, but by renouncing. Oh, long, long
afterwards, I knew that she had robbed the phantom of power over her by
robbing it of hatred. She had changed the thought of the past, in that
lay her victory.
At the moment I did not understand this. I did not understand it even
when I looked again for the apparition in the firelight, and saw that it
had vanished. There was nothing there--nothing except the pleasant
flicker of light and shadow on the old Persian rug.