There came a night when the husband was alone in that street waiting. He
can do nothing for you now, little nursery governess, you must fight it
out by yourself; when there are great things to do in the house the man
must leave. Oh, man, selfish, indelicate, coarse-grained at the best,
thy woman's hour has come; get thee gone.
He slouches from the house, always her true lover I do believe,
chivalrous, brave, a boy until to-night; but was he ever unkind to her?
It is the unpardonable sin now; is there the memory of an unkindness
to stalk the street with him to-night? And if not an unkindness, still
might he not sometimes have been a little kinder?
Shall we make a new rule of life from tonight: always to try to be a
little kinder than is necessary?
Poor youth, she would come to the window if she were able, I am sure,
to sign that the one little unkindness is long forgotten, to send you
a reassuring smile till you and she meet again; and, if you are not to
meet again, still to send you a reassuring, trembling smile.
Ah, no, that was for yesterday; it is too late now. He wanders the
streets thinking of her tonight, but she has forgotten him. In her great
hour the man is nothing to the woman; their love is trivial now.
He and I were on opposite sides of the street, now become familiar
ground to both of us, and divers pictures rose before me in which Mary
A---- walked. Here was the morning after my only entry into her house.
The agent had promised me to have the obnoxious notice-board removed,
but I apprehended that as soon as the letter announcing his intention
reached her she would remove it herself, and when I passed by in the
morning there she was on a chair and a foot-stool pounding lustily at it
with a hammer. When it fell she gave it such a vicious little kick.
There were the nights when her husband came out to watch for the
postman. I suppose he was awaiting some letter big with the fate of a
picture. He dogged the postman from door to door like an assassin or a
guardian angel; never had he the courage to ask if there was a letter
for him, but almost as it fell into the box he had it out and tore it
open, and then if the door closed despairingly the woman who had been at
the window all this time pressed her hand to her heart. But if the news
was good they might emerge presently and strut off arm in arm in the
direction of the pork emporium.
One last picture. On summer evenings I had caught glimpses of them
through the open window, when she sat at the piano singing and playing
to him. Or while she played with one hand, she flung out the other for
him to grasp. She was so joyously happy, and she had such a romantic
mind. I conceived her so sympathetic that she always laughed before he
came to the joke, and I am sure she had filmy eyes from the very start
of a pathetic story.
And so, laughing and crying, and haunted by whispers, the little nursery
governess had gradually become another woman, glorified, mysterious. I
suppose a man soon becomes used to the great change, and cannot recall a
time when there were no babes sprawling in his Mary's face.
I am trying to conceive what were the thoughts of the young husband on
the other side of the street. “If the barrier is to be crossed to-night
may I not go with her? She is not so brave as you think her. When she
talked so gaily a few hours ago, O my God, did she deceive even you?”
Plain questions to-night. “Why should it all fall on her? What is the
man that he should be flung out into the street in this terrible hour?
You have not been fair to the man.”
Poor boy, his wife has quite forgotten him and his trumpery love. If she
lives she will come back to him, but if she dies she will die triumphant
and serene. Life and death, the child and the mother, are ever meeting
as the one draws into harbour and the other sets sail. They exchange a
bright “All's well” and pass on.
But afterward?
The only ghosts, I believe, who creep into this world, are dead young
mothers, returned to see how their children fare. There is no other
inducement great enough to bring the departed back. They glide into the
acquainted room when day and night, their jailers, are in the grip, and
whisper, “How is it with you, my child?” but always, lest a strange face
should frighten him, they whisper it so low that he may not hear. They
bend over him to see that he sleeps peacefully, and replace his sweet
arm beneath the coverlet, and they open the drawers to count how many
little vests he has. They love to do these things.
What is saddest about ghosts is that they may not know their child. They
expect him to be just as he was when they left him, and they are easily
bewildered, and search for him from room to room, and hate the unknown
boy he has become. Poor, passionate souls, they may even do him an
injury. These are the ghosts that go wailing about old houses, and
foolish wild stories are invented to explain what is all so pathetic and
simple. I know of a man who, after wandering far, returned to his early
home to pass the evening of his days in it, and sometimes from his chair
by the fire he saw the door open softly and a woman's face appear.
She always looked at him very vindictively, and then vanished. Strange
things happened in this house. Windows were opened in the night. The
curtains of his bed were set fire to. A step on the stair was loosened.
The covering of an old well in a corridor where he walked was cunningly
removed. And when he fell ill the wrong potion was put in the glass by
his bedside, and he died. How could the pretty young mother know that
this grizzled interloper was the child of whom she was in search?
All our notions about ghosts are wrong. It is nothing so petty as lost
wills or deeds of violence that brings them back, and we are not nearly
so afraid of them as they are of us.
One by one the lights of the street went out, but still a lamp burned
steadily in the little window across the way. I know not how it
happened, whether I had crossed first to him or he to me, but, after
being for a long time as the echo of each other's steps, we were
together now. I can have had no desire to deceive him, but some reason
was needed to account for my vigil, and I may have said something that
he misconstrued, for above my words he was always listening for other
sounds. But however it came about he had conceived the idea that I was
an outcast for a reason similar to his own, and I let his mistake pass,
it seemed to matter so little and to draw us together so naturally.
We talked together of many things, such as worldly ambition. For long
ambition has been like an ancient memory to me, some glorious day
recalled from my springtime, so much a thing of the past that I must
make a railway journey to revisit it as to look upon the pleasant fields
in which that scene was laid. But he had been ambitious yesterday.