AFTERWARD

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.” 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.