The difficulties of domestication at St. Johnswort had not been
misrepresented by the late proprietor, Hewson found, when he went to take
possession of his estate. He thought it right in engaging servants to say
openly that the place had the reputation of being haunted, and if he had
not thought it right he would have thought it expedient, for he knew that
if he had concealed the fact it would have been discovered to them within
twenty-four hours of their arrival. His declaration was sufficient at
once with most, who recoiled from his service as if he had himself been a
ghost; with one or two sceptics who seemed willing to take the risks
(probably in a guilty consciousness of records that would have kept them
out of other employ) his confession that he had himself seen the spectre
which haunted St. Johnswort, was equally effective. He prevailed at last
against the fact and his own testimony with a Japanese, who could not be
made to understand the objection to the place, and who willingly went
with Hewson as his valet and general house-workman. With the wife of the
gardener coming in to cook for them during the long daylight, he got on
in as much comfort as he could have expected, and by night he suffered no
sort of disturbance from the apparition. He had expected to be annoyed by
believers in spiritualism, and other psychical inquirers, but it sufficed
with them to learn from him that he had come to regard his experience, of
which he had no more question now than ever, as purely subjective.
It seemed to Hewson, in the six weeks’ time which he spent at St.
Johnswort, waiting to hear from Rosalie (he had come already to think of
her as Rosalie), that all his life was subjective, it passed so like a
dream. He had some outward cares as to the place; he kept a horse in the
stable, where St. John had kept half a dozen, and he had the gardener
look after that as well as the shrubs and vegetables; but all went on in
a suspensive and provisional sort. In the mean time Rosalie’s charm grew
upon him; everything that she had said or looked, was hourly and daily
sweeter and dearer; her truth was intoxicating, beyond the lures of other
women, in which the quality of deceit had once fascinated him. Now, so
late in his youthful life, he realized that there was no beauty but that
of truth, and he pledged himself a thousand times that if she should say
she could not live without him he would henceforward live for truth
alone, and not for the truth merely as it was in her, but as it was in
everything. In those day’s he learned to know himself, as he never had
before, and to put off a certain shell of worldliness that had grown upon
him. In his remoteness from it, New York became very distasteful to him;
he thought with reluctance of going back to it; his club, which had been
his home, now appeared a joyless exile; the life of a leisure class,
which he had made his ideal, looked pitifully mean and little in the
retrospect; he wondered how he could have valued the things that he had
once thought worthy. He did not know what he should replace it all with,
but Rosalie would know, in the event of not being able to live without
him. In that event there was hardly any use of which he could not be
capable. In any other event--he surprised himself by realizing that in
any other event--still the universe had somehow more meaning than it once
had. Somehow, he felt himself an emancipated man.
He began many letters to Rosalie, and some he finished and some not, but
he sent none; and when her letter came at last, he was glad that he had
waited for it in implicit trust of its coming, though he believed she
would have forgiven him if he had not had the patience. The letter was
quite what he could have imagined of her. She said that she had put
herself thoroughly to the test, and she could not live without him. But
if he had found out that he could live without her, then she should know
that she had been to blame, and would take her punishment. Apparently in
her philosophy, which now seemed to him so divine, without punishment
there must be perdition; it was the penalty that redeemed; that was the
token of forgiveness.
Hewson hurried out to Colorado, where he found Hernshaw a stout, silent,
impersonal man, whose notion of the paternal office seemed to be a ready
acquiescence in a daughter’s choice of a husband; he appeared to think
this could be best expressed to Hewson in a good cigar He perceptibly
enjoyed the business details of the affair, but he enjoyed despatching
them in the least possible time and the fewest words, and then he settled
down to the pleasure of a superficial passivity. Hewson could not make
out that he regarded his daughter as at all an unusual girl, and from
this he argued that her mother must have been a very unusual woman. His
only reason for doubting that Rosalie must have got all her originality
from her mother was something that fell from Hernshaw when they were near
the end of their cigars. He said irrelevantly to their talk at that
point, “I suppose you know Rosalie believes in that ghost of yours?”
“Was it a ghost?--I’ve never been sure, myself,” said Hewson.
“How do you explain it?” asked his prospective father-in-law.
“I don’t explain it. I have always left it just as it was. I know that it
was a real experience.”
“I think I should have left it so, too,” said Hernshaw. “That always
gives it a chance to explain itself. If such a thing had happened to me I
should give it all the time it wanted.”
“Well, I haven’t hurried it,” Hewson suggested.
“What I mean,” and Hernshaw stepped to the edge of the porch and threw
the butt of his cigar into the darkness, where it described a glimmering
arc, “is that if anything came to me that would help shore up my
professed faith in what most of us want to believe in, I would take the
common-law view of it. I would believe it was innocent till it proved
itself guilty. I wouldn’t try to make it out a fraud myself.”
“I’m afraid that’s what I’ve really done,” said Hewson. “But before
people I’ve put up a bluff of despising it.”
“Oh, yes, I understand that,” said Hernshaw. “A man thinks that if he
can have an experience like that he must be something out of the common,
and if he can despise it--”
“You’ve hit my case exactly,” said Hewson, and the two men laughed.