It was the first time that Verrian had come down late, and it was his
novel experience to find himself in charge of Mrs. Stager at breakfast,
instead of the butler and the butler’s man, who had hitherto served him
at the earlier hour. There were others, somewhat remote from him, at
table, who were ending when he was beginning, and when they had joked
themselves out of the room and away from Mrs. Stager’s ministrations
he was left alone to her. He had instantly appreciated a quality of
motherliness in her attitude towards him, and now he was sensible of a
kindly intimacy to which he rather helplessly addressed himself.
“Well, Mrs. Stager, did you see a ghost on your way to bed?”
“I don’t know as I really expected to,” she said. “Won’t you have a few
more of the buckwheats?”
“Do you think I’d better? I believe I won’t. They’re very tempting. Miss
Shirley makes a very good ghost,” he suggested.
Mrs. Stager would not at first commit herself further than to say in
bringing him the butter, “She’s just up from a long fit of sickness.”
She impulsively added, “She ain’t hardly strong enough to be doing what
she is, I tell her.”
“I understood she had been ill,” Verrian said. “We drove over from the
station together, the other day.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Stager admitted. “Kind of a nervous breakdown, I believe.
But she’s got an awful spirit. Mrs. Westangle don’t want her to do all
she is doing.”
Verrian looked at her in surprise. He had not expected that of the
India-rubber nature he had attributed to Mrs. Westangle. In view of Mrs.
Stager’s privity to the unimagined kindliness of his hostess, he relaxed
himself in a further interest in Miss Shirley, as if it would now be
safe. “She’s done splendidly, so far,” he said, meaning the girl. “I’m
glad Mrs. Westangle appreciates her work.”
“I guess,” Mrs. Stager said, “that if it hadn’t been for you at the
snow-fight--She got back from getting ready for it, that morning, almost
down sick, she was afraid so it was going to fail.”
“I didn’t do anything,” Verrian said, putting the praise from him.
Mrs. Stager lowered her voice in an octave of deeper confidentiability.
“You got the note? I put it under, and I didn’t know.”
“Oh yes, I got it,” Verrian said, sensible of a relief, which he would
not assign to any definite reason, in knowing that Miss Shirley had not
herself put it under his door. But he now had to take up another burden
in the question whether Miss Shirley were of an origin so much above
that of her confidant that she could have a patrician fearlessness in
making use of her, or were so near Mrs. Stager’s level of life that she
would naturally turn to her for counsel and help. Miss Shirley had the
accent, the manners, and the frank courage of a lady; but those things
could be learned; they were got up for the stage every day.
Verrian was roused from the muse he found he had fallen into by hearing
Mrs. Stager ask, “Won’t you have some more coffee?”
“No, thank you,” he said. And now he rose from the table, on which he
dreamily dropped his napkin, and got his hat and coat and went out for a
walk. He had not studied the art of fiction so long, in the many private
failures that had preceded his one public success, without being made
to observe that life sometimes dealt in the accidents and coincidences
which his criticism condemned as too habitually the resource of the
novelist. Hitherto he had disdained them for this reason; but since his
serial story was off his hands, and he was beginning to look about him
for fresh material, he had doubted more than once whether his severity
was not the effect of an unjustifiable prejudice.
It struck him now, in turning the corner of the woodlot above the meadow
where the snow-battle had taken place, and suddenly finding himself face
to face with Miss Shirley, that nature was in one of her uninventive
moods and was helping herself out from the old stock-in-trade of
fiction. All the same, he felt a glow of pleasure, which was also a glow
of pity; for while Miss Shirley looked, as always, interesting, she look
tired, too, with a sort of desperate air which did not otherwise account
for itself. She had given, at sight of him, a little start, and a little
“Oh!” dropped from her lips, as if it had been jostled from them. She
made haste to go on, with something like the voluntary hardiness of the
courage that plucks itself from the primary emotion of fear, “You are
going down to try the skating?”
“Do I look it, without skates?”
“You may be going to try the sliding,” she returned. “I’m afraid there
won’t be much of either for long. This soft air is going to make havoc
of my plans for to-morrow.”
“That’s too bad of it. Why not hope for a hard freeze to-night? You
might as well. The weather has been known to change its mind. You might
even change your plans.”
“No, I can’t do that. I can’t think of anything else. It’s to bridge
over the day that’s left before Seeing Ghosts. If it does freeze, you’ll
come to Mrs. Westangle’s afternoon tea on the pond?”
“I certainly shall. How is it to be worked?”
“She’s to have her table on a platform, with runners, in a bower of
evergreen boughs, and be pushed about, and the people are to skate up
for the tea. There are to be tea and chocolate, and two girls to pour,
just as in real life. It isn’t a very dazzling idea, but I thought it
might do; and Mrs. Westangle is so good-natured. Now, if the thermometer
will do its part!”
“I am sure it will,” Verrian said, but a glance at the gray sky did not
confirm him in his prophetic venture. The snow was sodden under foot; a
breath from the south stirred the pines to an Aeolian response and moved
the stiff, dry leaves of the scrub-oaks. A sapsucker was marking an
accurate circle of dots round the throat of a tall young maple,
and enjoying his work in a low, guttural soliloquy, seemingly, yet,
dismayingly, suggestive of spring.
“It’s lovely, anyway,” she said, following his glance with an upward
turn of her face.
“Yes, it’s beautiful. I think this sort of winter day is about the best
the whole year can do. But I will sacrifice the chance of another like
it to your skating-tea, Miss Shirley.”
He did not know why he should have made this speech to her, but
apparently she did, and she said, “You’re always coming to my help, Mr.
Verrian.”
“Don’t mention it!”
“I won’t, then,” she said, with a smile that showed her thin face at its
thinnest and left her lip caught on her teeth till she brought it down
voluntarily. It was a small but full lip and pretty, and this trick of
it had a fascination. She added, gravely, “I don’t believe you will like
my ice-tea.”
“I haven’t any active hostility to it. You can’t always be striking
twelve--twelve midnight--as you will be in Seeing Ghosts. But your
ice-tea will do very well for striking five. I’m rather elaborate!”
“Not too elaborate to hide your real opinion. I wonder what you do think
of my own elaboration--I mean of my scheme.”
“Yes?”
They had moved on, at his turning to walk with her, so as not to keep
her standing in the snow, and now she said, looking over her shoulder at
him, “I’ve decided that it won’t do to let the ghost have all the glory.
I don’t think it will be fair to let the people merely be scared, even
when they’ve been warned that they’re to see a ghost and told it isn’t
real.”
She seemed to refer the point to him, and he said, provisionally, “I
don’t know what more they can ask.”
“They can ask questions. I’m going to let each person speak to the
ghost, if not scared dumb, and ask it just what they please; and I’m
going to answer their questions if I can.”
“Won’t it be something of an intellectual strain?”
“Yes, it will. But it will be fun, too, a little, and it will help the
thing to go off. What do you think?”
“I think it’s fine. Are you going to give it out, so that they can be
studying up their questions?”
“No, their questions have got to be impromptu. Or, at least, the first
one has. Of course, after the scheme has once been given away, the
ghost-seers will be more or less prepared, and the ghost will have to
stand it.”
“I think it’s great. Are you going to let me have a chance with a
question?”
“Are you going to see a ghost?”
“To be sure I am. May I really ask it what I please?”
“If you’re honest.”
“Oh, I shall be honest--”
He stopped breathlessly, but she did not seem called upon to supply any
meaning for his abruptness. “I’m awfully glad you like the idea,” she
said, “I have had to think the whole thing out for myself, and I haven’t
been quite certain that the question-asking wasn’t rather silly, or, at
least, sillier than the rest. Thank you so much, Mr. Verrian.”
“I’ve thought of my question,” he began again, as abruptly as he had
stopped before. “May I ask it now?”
Cries of laughter came up from the meadow below, and the voices seemed
coming nearer.
“Oh, I mustn’t be seen!” Miss Shirley lamented. “Oh, dear! If I’m seen
the whole thing is given away. What shall I do?” She whirled about and
ran down the road towards a path that entered the wood.
He ran after her. “My question is, May I come to see you when you get
back to town?”
“Yes, certainly. But don’t come now! You mustn’t be seen with me! I’m
not supposed to be in the house at all.”
If Verrian’s present mood had been more analytic, it might have occurred
to him that the element of mystery which Miss Shirley seemed to
cherish in regard to herself personally was something that she could
dramatically apply with peculiar advantage to the phantasmal part she
was to take in her projected entertainment. But he was reduced from the
exercise of his analytic powers to a passivity in which he was chiefly
conscious of her pathetic fascination. This seemed to emanate from her
frail prettiness no less than from the sort of fearful daring with which
she was pushing her whole enterprise through; it came as much from her
undecided blondness--from her dust-colored hair, for instance--as
from the entreating look of her pinched eyes, only just lighting their
convalescent fires, and from the weakness that showed, with the grace,
in her run through the wintry woods, where he watched her till the
underbrush thickened behind her and hid her from him. Altogether his
impression was very complex, but he did not get so far even as the
realization of this, in his mental turmoil, as he turned with a deep
sigh and walked meditatively homeward through the incipient thaw.
It did not rain at night, as it seemed so likely to do, and by morning
the cloudiness of the sky had so far thinned that the sun looked mildly
through it without more than softening the frozen surface of the pond,
so that Mrs. Westangle’s ice-tea (as everybody called it, by a common
inspiration, or by whatever circuitous adoption of Verrian’s phrase)
came off with great success. People from other houses were there, and
they all said that they wondered how she came to have such a brilliant
idea, and they kept her there till nearly dark. Then the retarded rain
began, in a fine drizzle, and her house guests were forced homeward, but
not too soon to get a good, long rest before dressing for dinner.
She was praised for her understanding with the weather, and for her
meteorological forecast as much as for her invention in imagining such a
delightful and original thing as an ice-tea, which no one else had ever
thought of. Some of the women appealed to Verrian to say if he had
ever heard of anything like it; and they felt that Mrs. Westangle was
certainly arriving, and by no beaten track.
None of the others put it in these terms, of course; it was merely a
consensus of feeling with them, and what was more articulate was dropped
among the ironies with which Miss Macroyd more confidentially celebrated
the event. Out of hearing of the others, in slowly following them with
Verrian, she recurred to their talk. “Yes, it’s only a question of money
enough for Newport, after this. She’s chic now, and after a season
there she will be smart. But oh, dear! How came she to be chic? Can you
imagine?”
Verrian did not feel bound to a categorical answer, and in his private
reflections he dealt with another question. This was how far Miss
Shirley was culpable in the fraud she was letting Mrs. Westangle
practise on her innocent guests. It was a distasteful question, and he
did not find it much more agreeable when it subdivided itself into the
question of necessity on her part, and of a not very clearly realized
situation on Mrs. Westangle’s. The girl had a right to sell her ideas,
and perhaps the woman thought they were her own when she had paid for
them. There could be that view of it all. The furtive nature of Miss
Shirley’s presence in the house might very well be a condition of that
grand event she was preparing. It was all very mysterious.