Verrian remained to finish his cigar, but at the end he was not yet
sleepy, and he thought he would get a book from the library, if
that part of the house were still lighted, and he looked out to see.
Apparently it was as brilliantly illuminated as when the company had
separated there for the night, and he pushed across the foyer hall
that separated the billiard-room from the drawing-zoom and library. He
entered the drawing-room, and in the depths of the library, relieved
against the rows of books in their glass cases, he startled Miss Shirley
from a pose which she seemed to be taking there alone.
At the instant of their mutual recognition she gave a little muted
shriek, and then gasped out, “I beg your pardon,” while he was saying,
too, “I beg your pardon.”
After a tacit exchange of forgiveness, he said, “I am afraid I startled
you. I was just coming for a book to read myself asleep with. I--”
“Not at all,” she returned. “I was just--” Then she did not say what,
and he asked:
“Making some studies?”
“Yes,” she owned, with reluctant promptness.
“I mustn’t ask what,” he suggested, and he made an effort to smile away
what seemed a painful perturbation in her as he went forward to look at
the book-shelves, from which, till then, she had not slipped aside.
“I’m in your way,” she said, and he answered, “Not at all.” He added to
the other sentence he had spoken, “If it’s going to be as good as what
you gave us today--”
“You are very kind.” She hesitated, and then she said, abruptly: “What
I did to-day owed everything to you, Mr. Verrian,” and while he desisted
from searching the book-shelves, she stood looking anxiously at him,
with the pulse in her neck visibly throbbing. Her agitation was really
painful, but Verrian did not attribute it to her finding herself there
alone with him at midnight; for though the other guests had all gone to
bed, the house was awake in some of the servants, and an elderly woman
came in presently bringing a breadth of silvery gauze, which she held
up, asking if it was that.
“Not exactly, but it will do nicely, Mrs. Stager. Would you mind getting
me the very pale-blue piece that electric blue?”
“I’m looking for something good and dull,” Verrian said, when the woman
was gone.
“Travels are good, or narratives, for sleeping on,” she said, with a
breathless effort for calm. “I found,” she panted, “in my own insomnia,
that merely the broken-up look of a page of dialogue in a novel racked
my nerves so that I couldn’t sleep. But narratives were beautifully
soothing.”
“Thank you,” he responded; “that’s a good idea.” And stooping, with his
hands on his knees, he ranged back and forth along the shelves. “But
Mrs. Westangle’s library doesn’t seem to be very rich in narrative.”
He had not his mind on the search perhaps, and perhaps she knew it. She
presently said, “I wish I dared ask you a favor--I mean your advice, Mr.
Verrian.”
He lifted himself from his stooping posture and looked at her, smiling.
“Would that take much courage?” His smile was a little mocking; he
was thinking that a girl who would hurry that note to him, and would
personally see that it did not fail to reach him, would have the courage
for much more.
She did not reply directly. “I should have to explain, but I know you
won’t tell. This is going to be my piece de resistance, my grand stunt.
I’m going to bring it off the last night.” She stopped long enough for
Verrian to revise his resolution of going away with the fellows who were
leaving the middle of the week, and to decide on staying to the end. “I
am going to call it Seeing Ghosts.”
“That’s good,” Verrian said, provisionally.
“Yes, I might say I was surprised at my thinking it up.”
“That would be one form of modesty.”
“Yes,” she said, with a wan smile she had, “and then again it mightn’t
be another.” She went on, abruptly, “As many as like can take part
in the performance. It’s to be given out, and distinctly understood
beforehand, that the ghost isn’t a veridical phantom, but just an
honest, made-up, every-day spook. It may change its pose from time to
time, or its drapery, but the setting is to be always the same, and the
people who take their turns in seeing it are to be explicitly reassured,
one after another, that there’s nothing in it, you know. The fun will be
in seeing how each one takes it, after they know what it really is.”
“Then you’re going to give us a study of temperaments.”
“Yes,” she assented. And after a moment, given to letting the notion get
quite home with her, she asked, vividly, “Would you let me use it?”
“The phrase? Why, certainly. But wouldn’t it be rather too
psychological? I think just Seeing Ghosts would be better.”
“Better than Seeing Ghosts: A Study of Temperaments? Perhaps it would.
It would be simpler.”
“And in this house you need all the simplicity you can get,” he
suggested.
She smiled, intelligently but reticently. “My idea is that every one
somehow really believes in ghosts--I know I do--and so fully expects to
see one that any sort of make-up will affect them for the moment just as
if they did see one. I thought--that perhaps--I don’t know how to say it
without seeming to make use of you--”
“Oh, do make use of me, Miss Shirley!”
“That you could give me some hints about the setting, with your
knowledge of the stage--” She stopped, having rushed forward to that
point, while he continued to look steadily at her without answering her.
She faced him courageously, but not convincingly.
“Did you think that I was an actor?” he asked, finally.
“Mrs. Westangle seemed to think you were.”
“But did you?”
“I’m sure I didn’t mean--I beg your pardon--”
“It’s all right. If I were an actor I shouldn’t be ashamed of it. But
I was merely curious to know whether you shared the prevalent
superstition. I’m afraid I can’t help you from a knowledge of the stage,
but if I can be of use, from a sort of amateur interest in psychology,
with an affair like this I shall be only too glad.”
“Thank you,” she said, somewhat faintly, with an effect of dismay
disproportionate to the occasion.
She sank into a chair before which she had been standing, and she looked
as if she were going to swoon.
He started towards her with an alarmed “Miss Shirley.”
She put out a hand weakly to stay him. “Don’t!” she entreated. “I’m a
little--I shall be all right in a moment.”
“Can’t I get you something--call some one?”
“Not for the world!” she commanded, and she pulled herself together and
stood up. “But I think I’ll stop for to-night. I’m glad my idea strikes
you favorably. It’s merely--Oh, you found it, Mrs. Stager!” She broke
off to address the woman who had now come back and was holding up the
trailing breadths of the electric-blue gauze. “Isn’t it lovely?” She
gave herself time to adore the drapery, with its changes of meteoric
lucence, before she rose and took it. She went with it to the background
in the library, where, against the glass door of the cases, she involved
herself in it and stood shimmering. A thrill pierced to Verrian’s heart;
she was indeed wraithlike, so that he hated to have her call, “How will
that do?”
Mrs. Stager modestly referred the question to him by her silence. “I
will answer for its doing, if it does for the others as it’s done for
me.”
She laughed. “And you doubly knew what it was. Yes, I think it will go.”
She took another pose, and then another. “What do you think of it, Mrs.
Stager?” she called to the woman standing respectfully abeyant at one
side.
“It’s awful. I don’t know but I’ll be afraid to go to my room.”
“Sit down, and I’ll go to your room with you when I’m through. I won’t
be long, now.”
She tried different gauzes, which she had lying on one of the chairs,
and crowned herself with triumph in the applauses of her two spectators,
rejoicing with a glee that Verrian found childlike and winning. “If
they’re all like you, it will be the greatest success!”
“They’ll all be like me, and more,” he said, “I’m really very severe.”
“Are you a severe person?” she asked, coming forward to him. “Ought
people to be afraid of you?”
“Yes, people with bad consciences. I’m rattier afraid of myself for that
reason.”
“Have you got a bad conscience?” she asked, letting her eyes rest on
his.
“Yes. I can’t make my conduct square with my ideal of conduct.”
“I know what that is!” she sighed. “Do you expect to be punished for
it?”
“I expect to be got even with.”
“Yes, one is. I’ve noticed that myself. But I didn’t suppose
that actors--Oh, I forgot! I beg your pardon again, Mr. Verrian.
Oh--Goodnight!” She faced him evanescently in going out, with the woman
after her, but, whether she did so more in fear or more in defiance, she
left him standing motionless in his doubt, and she did nothing to solve
his doubt when she came quickly back alone, before he was aware of
having moved, to say, “Mr. Verrian, I want to--I have to--tell you
that--I didn’t think you were the actor.” Then she was finally gone,
and Verrian had nothing for it but to go up to his room with the book he
found he had in his hand and must have had there all the time.
If he had read it, the book would not have eased him off to sleep, but
he did not even try, to read it. He had no wish to sleep. The waking
dream in which he lost himself was more interesting than any vision
of slumber could have been, and he had no desire to end it. In that he
could still be talking with the girl whose mystery appealed to him so
pleasingly. It was none the less pleasing because, at what might
be called her first blushes, she did not strike him as altogether
ingenuous, but only able to discipline herself into a final sincerity
from a consciousness which had been taught wisdom by experience.
She was still a scarcely recovered invalid, and it was pathetic that
she should be commencing the struggle of life with strength so little
proportioned to the demand upon it; and the calling she had taken up was
of a fantasticality in some aspects which was equally pathetic. But
all the undertakings of women, he mused, were piteous, not only because
women were unequal to the struggle at the best, but because they were
hampered always with themselves, with their sex, their femininity, and
the necessity of getting it out of the way before they could really
begin to fight. Whatever they attempted it must be in relation to the
man’s world in which livings were made; but the immemorial conditions
were almost wholly unchanged. A woman approached this world as a woman,
with the inborn instinct of tempting it as a woman, to win it to love
her and make her a wife and mother; and although she might stoically
overcome the temptation at last, it might recur at any moment and
overcome her. This was perpetually weakening and imperilling her, and
she must feel it at the encounter with each man she met. She must feel
the tacit and even unconscious irony of his attitude towards her in her
enterprise, and the finer her make the crueller and the more humiliating
and disheartening this must be.
Of course, this Miss Shirley felt Verrian’s irony, which he had guarded
from any expression with genuine compassion for her. She must feel that
to his knowledge of life she and her experiment had an absurdity which
would not pass, whatever their success might be. If she meant business,
and business only, they ought to have met as two men would have met, but
he knew that they had not done so, and she must have known it. All that
was plain sailing enough, but beyond this lay a sea of conjecture in
which he found himself without helm or compass. Why, should she have
acted a fib about his being an actor, and why, after the end, should
she have added an end, in which she returned to own that she had been
fibbing? For that was what it came to; and though Verrian tasted a
delicious pleasure in the womanish feat by which she overcame her
womanishness, he could not puzzle out her motive. He was not sure that
he wished to puzzle it out. To remain with illimitable guesses at his
choice was more agreeable, for the present at least, and he was not
aware of having lapsed from them when he woke so late as to be one of
the breakfasters whose plates were kept for them after the others were
gone.