that there had been hyacinths on the piano, almost overpowering in the
dusk of the room that will always be nearest to me--I hope I may lie
there, dead. I was playing Chopin, and life looked so rich: the boy
was not born yet. I said, "If he should die"--but of course I couldn't
believe that he would. And then--and then it was as if he had _not_
died, after all, and I saw that this had been a mistake, too! It was
so calm, so simple--no shock at all. Why had I never known? And all
this while the girls and I had kept flowers on that tiny, tiny grave!
I must tell his father....
She dropped her eyes to the hyacinths and I put my hand on a chair to
steady myself. My cheeks were all wet.
"Mr. Vail seems very contented," she said. "Of course, I am accustomed
to looking after him."
She stepped quietly through an open door, the keys jangling softly at
her belt.
* * * * *
I went South with my husband for a fortnight, and on my return Will
dined with us.
"By the way," he said, "were you surprised at Vail's death?"
It was three days' news and I had forgotten to mention it.
"He never was the same after the pneumonia, and he worried about his
daughter Irene. She came through all right, though. Well, he was over
sixty."
"How--what became of Mrs. Leeth?" I asked eagerly.
He smiled oddly.
"Nobody knows. She's never been seen since the funeral."
"Never been seen? But who is the housekeeper, then?"
"Oh, they've got another. Never'll be Mrs. Leeth's equal, though. She
left on the first of the month."
"But when she was paid off, didn't anybody inquire?"
"She never was paid off," he said quietly. "She never came for her
money."
THE UNBURIED
The talk shifted at length--as it inevitably must--to women, and the
unalterable and uncharted mystery of their mental currents: the jagged
and cruelly unsuspected reefs that rear suddenly under rippling
shoal-water, the maelstrom that boils just beyond the soft curve of the
fairest cape.
"There's no good asking 'why,'" said the great doctor slowly, "you
might as well ask, 'why not.' They're incomprehensible. For thirty
years I've studied them. Thirty years...."
He leaned forward over the table weightily. The others unconsciously
bent toward him.
"Once I thought it was spasmodic--unrelated," he went on thoughtfully,
counting his words, it seemed, "but not now. No. I believe there is a
law--a big law--they follow, an orbit so extended that any examples one
may collect count for too little to help. They seem to vary..." he
stared at the siphons and rings of wet on the table.
Outside the club windows the rain fell, glistening and grey; it was
making for dusk and the black stream of hansoms and umbrellas were
homeward bound. They motioned away the servant who had come to turn on
the lights in their corner.
"There are influences," Stanchon began again, abruptly, "currents ... I
don't know--they feel them more than we do. And they exert them more,
too. We admit one and doubt the other."
He squeezed a half lemon into his glass with a beautiful, firm-wristed
wrench, extracted the pips with one deft circuit of the spoon, and
poured rock candy into the acid. Over this he dropped in silence a
measured amount from a squat foreign bottle at his elbow and filled the
glass from a carafe of distilled water.
"It's a queer thing altogether--I don't know what makes me think of
it," he began, "and I wouldn't have dared tell it when it happened.
Now I can tell anything--I suppose--being sixty and an eminent
alienist. Lord! Times goes and goes, and just as you get to where you
could use it to advantage--well, the young ones need the room.
"Nervous! What are nerves, anyhow?
"Sometimes I think I know ... a little ... but the time is so short, so
short!"
He drank half his glass.
"There comes a time," he said abruptly, "when you first discover what a
gnat in a whirlpool you are. I mean that after you've done everything,
played perfectly fair and followed all the rules, arranged your
combinations and observed the reasonable results for so long that you
begin to think you've got hold of the System--something happens, and
it's all upset again--flat anarchy. We get it different ways, I
suppose. As if a runner bumped into a brick wall on the home-stretch
... strange!
"I was in one of those little cities--Detroit, Cleveland--it doesn't
matter. I've lived in both. It's a good size for a doctor--I got all
kinds--and I learned fast, there. Nice people, too. I always had an
eye for real estate, and what I made, I put into that. I had a good
horse, and as I drove about I kept my eye on the property and the way
the town was growing. One day I noticed that an oldish looking,
comfortable sort of house, a little off from the centre of things, was
for sale, and it struck me suddenly that there was a pretty good sort
of house to own. It had trees around it and nice paths and a neat
little new stable, and there was something in the long, low lines of
it--no gingerbread or 'Jim Fisk' business or bands of coloured
paint--that appealed to me. It attracted me--you see? Good God!
"I saw the agent and he put a price that surprised me. But the owner
wanted to leave town immediately and had made it very low, to get the
cash. He'd had hard luck; his wife in a mess with another man, ran up
big bills against him--he wanted to get away and never see the town
again. So I bought the place and asked the agent to rent it for me,
for I was pretty busy just then. A little later he told me he had seen
an especially good tenant--a well-to-do jeweller and his family, who
seemed disposed to take a long lease and improve the property.
"'You certainly have the luck, doctor!' he said.
"I remember I leaned out of my buggy and lectured him.
"'Luck!' says I. 'Nonsense, man! I get good tenants because I keep
good repairs in good houses. You put down two and two and you get back
four. Mathematics is under this world!'
"Pompous, wasn't I? But I was only forty. Only forty..."
His eyes gleamed at them from under his shaggy, grey brows; he seemed
saturated with life, full of experiences.
"Well, I got my rent every month, and I gave 'em permission to put an
evergreen hedge around the place, and I paid half the costs of piping
water into the stable; the jeweller kept a horse and runabout for his
wife. Then, just before the year was up, the agent called.
"'I'm afraid we won't get any renewal on this, doctor,' he said.
"'Why not? Not good enough for him any longer?' said I.
"'I'm afraid it's too good,' says he. 'You'll see it in the papers
to-morrow, but I had it straight from him. His wife has skipped with
his head clerk and they've taken most of the stock and all the money.
He's nearly crazy.'
"'For heaven's sake!' said I. 'I thought they were a decent lot
enough.'
"'So they were, I'll swear to it,' said he, 'but lately--I've seen her
off and on'--and he looked rather conscious, I thought--' she's struck
me differently. She's a queer woman.'
"Well, the upshot of it was, I let him off as easily as I could--he had
three children on his hands and big debts to pay--and I bought a lot of
his stuff and paid for the evergreen hedge. The woman never came back
and he moved East. So much for them.
"I advertised the house, and that week the rectory of the principal
Episcopal Church burned to the ground, and while they were building it
again--in stone, of course--they decided to rent that house of mine,
and of course I was pleased, because a lot of good, solid people see
the property, in a case like that. I've always thought I'd like to
develop a whole new section somewhere ... I had ideas ... but I never
got the time. O Lord, the time! Slipping, slipping, under your palms,
between your fingers, crumbling and running away!"
He shook himself like a big, loose-skinned bear, and long breaths were
drawn all around the table.
"One night my wife asked me if I thought the rector liked his new
rectory.
"'Why, I suppose so,' I said. 'I've had no complaints--why?'
"'He doesn't stay in it very much,' she said, rather slowly, for her,
and when a woman measures her words, I always listen very carefully.
"'What do you mean?' I asked.
"'He practically lives in the study at the church,' said she, 'working
there on parish business all day, and a good many evenings, too. That
leaves her all alone, and that's not good for any woman.'
"' What on earth do you mean?' I said. 'Are those long-nosed old
tabbies gossiping already? Shame on 'em!'
"'Oh, John,' she broke down and cried. 'They're talking horribly! It
doesn't seem possible! But why isn't she more careful?'
"Well, there's no good going into that much further. It was a very
unpleasant business. He was a pig-headed parson who wouldn't look
after his own, and she, I thought, till my wife finally persuaded her
to call me in, was simply one of those women who have mistaken their
natural vocation. They hadn't been in the town long and they didn't
stay long, for as soon as I really understood her I put her into a
sanitarium--the sanitarium boom had just begun, then--and he went into
the Salvation Army. He'd got his eyes opened, I fancy, and he made a
great success in Chicago; he told me he never wanted to see another
fashionable congregation in his life--said they were sinks of iniquity.
But I don't think there was ever anything actually iniquitous in that
business--it hadn't got that far. Only for a clergyman's family, of
course ...
"You see, I got her out in time. Ugh! It makes me sick to think of
it! She was a nervous wreck.
"That was the first time that Miss Jessop ever went back on me. She
was a trained nurse not long out of the training school, and nurses
were scarcer, then. A handsome, plucky creature--we worked together
for years, and I got to depend a good deal on her. But after a week of
the parson's wife she flounced in on me with that regular bronze-mule
look of hers and informed me she was leaving the next day--she had to
go back East, home, she said.
"I reasoned a bit with her--she had a great influence on women, Jessop,
but it was no use.
"'There are two good nurses for to-morrow, doctor,' she said, 'I happen
to know. I'd rather not argue about it. I'm tired. I need a change.
I've had no vacation this year. And that woman would be better off in
a hospital, anyway.'
"I was cross, and I kept my patient in her own house. I thought she
wasn't fit to move.
"'I believe I'm going mad!' she used to tell me, with that glitter in
the eye--gives the effect of a rearing horse--perfectly symptomatic.
'I tell you I'm not responsible, doctor, for what I do! You must keep
me away from--people. But don't leave me alone--oh, don't leave me
alone! Why don't the women come to see me? Oh, I can't stay alone!'
"And so on, and so on. It poured out in the regular way--how the poor
things spend themselves!--and I listened to it all. They're perfectly
typical under those circumstances, but one phrase struck me:
"'I have fought-- Oh, I _have_ fought! It's killing me, but I have
fought!'
"She had, poor little woman. But what was she? When I realised ...
when I _knew_..."
They sat now in a circle of dark. The room was nearly empty; the rain
had grown to a torrent and lashed the windows furiously.
"Well, I couldn't help taking stock of the thing, and it looked odd,
anyway you looked at it. I remembered that the reason I got the house
in the first place was very much the same reason that had emptied it
twice. Of course the agent remembered it, too.
"'Where's those mathematics of yours, doctor?' he asked me with a
good-natured grin.
"'Stuff and nonsense!' I said to him. 'I'll get a tenant for that
house, myself.'
"You see, whether or not there was any sense in it, I couldn't let that
house get a bad name. There were neighbours and they will talk--they
don't always know so much about mathematics as scientific men, you know!
"What a great thing it is, if one could get hold of it and use it--the
collective spirit of a community! It's utilizable--or ought to
be--like water power....
"There was a woman in town then, a 'mental healer,' she called herself.
I'd run across her more than once and she interested me very much. She
was a clever woman--sensible, too, which doesn't always follow, you
know. So far as I could tell, she never handled a case she wasn't able
to attend to, which may seem an odd thing for me to say, but happens to
be so. I know of a dozen nervous, hysterical women--emotional
spend-thrifts--that she bullied into shape and got so they could stand
up without her behind them, too. They were cured, and they stayed
cured. More than that, I sent more than one to her, myself!
"'Mrs. Mears,' I said, 'there's nothing the matter with these women
that I can see but pure, piggish, bone-idle selfishness. I haven't got
the courage to tell 'em so; if you have, and the long words you use
disguise the fact sufficiently, go ahead and cure 'em, and God bless
you!'
"'Thank you, doctor,' she said, and she cured 'em. They had no use for
me after that. No, indeed--they told my wife they'd found a higher law
and that calomel was sinful. But the poor old calomel wasn't so bad
for 'em, after all, maybe.
"Well, I met her on my rounds one day and I stopped and asked her if
she was satisfied with her house--I knew the neighbourhood was rather
running down, there--the darkies were creeping up. She admitted she
wasn't particularly, and, to make a long story short, I offered her
this house of mine for two-thirds the regular rental.
"'I want a good steady tenant, Mrs. Mears,' I said, 'and people may as
well get used to bringing their headaches over there--I may move out
there sometime.'
"So she moved in and I never gave the matter another thought--I knew
she wouldn't run off with anybody! No, she'd had her lesson, I take
it. No blue-eyed woman gets as sensible as that woman was without a
good, solid reason. And the reason is pretty certain to wear trousers.
"Well, sir, in a month she came to see me. I can see her now: a firm,
stocky woman, long body and short legs and big head--the efficient
type. She had the smooth pink cheeks and smooth forehead and straight
eyes those healer-women have when they're first class of their
kind--oh, there's a lot in it--a lot! We fight 'em and get the law on
'em and absorb 'em, finally, as we've fought every advance in medicine.
It seems to be the only way in this world...
"She always looked so clean and taut, that woman, never a loose end
anywhere.
"'Doctor,' says she, 'you must get a new tenant. I'm leaving
to-morrow. How much will it cost me, giving no notice?'
"'Why, what's the matter?' I began. 'Anything I can attend to?'
"'Not a thing,' she answered promptly, 'and we won't discuss it, if you
please. The van is there, by this time.'
"'Why, see here, Mrs. Mears,' I said seriously. 'This--this is hardly
professional, it seems to me. If there's anything wrong with my
property, I want to know it. Of course I know your theories--God's in
his heaven and all's right with the world, and if you discuss it, the
devil may creep in--I've read Emerson's Essays, myself. I know what
you think about medicine and surgery and hygiene--you think Emerson!
And that's all right, as far as it goes. But just for ten minutes,
between you and me, what's the matter? You can keep on being serene,
after that, all you want. Come now--as man to man!'
"She flattened her lips a little and tried not to scowl.
"'Put it that I don't like old houses, doctor,' she said finally.
"'Ah! House haunted?' I suggested, to tease her a little.
"She turned on me.
"'You said it, not I,' she answered, 'but it is true. The house is
haunted, doctor, and if I lived there a day longer, I couldn't do my
work. I didn't wish to discuss it--you know we don't believe in
that--but you meant to do me a service. It's a crime to rent that
house. It's slimy. It crawls.'
"'Slimy!' I cried. 'Why the agent told me that the cellar was new
cemented, all whitewashed, every room new papered, fresh matting, hard
wood on the lower floor, and I attended to the plumbing myself! It was
gone over thoroughly three years ago--there must have been a thousand
dollars put into it. It hadn't been lived in for years before that.
Slimy!'
"'You don't understand me,' she said quietly.
"'For heaven's sake, what haunts it, then? Who's the ghost?' I cried
testily.
"'Evil,' she said slowly, 'evil thought, evil lives ... you breathe it
in ... it tangles you ... another night there ... I should have no more
power, absolutely--I could help nobody. I must ask you not to refer to
it again, please. I should not have mentioned it. How much do I owe
you?'
"'You owe me nothing, of course,' I said shortly. 'I'll return you the
amount of your cheque this afternoon. I'll move into that house,
myself.'
"'You will be making a mistake,' she said very placidly, and left the
office.
"It took me about forty-eight hours to make my arrangements. It was
hot summer weather, fortunately, and I sent my wife off to the
mountains, started in to have my own house renovated and decorated, as
an excuse, left the housekeeper in charge there and moved my office
paraphernalia into that old house with the evergreen hedge. My wife
was a Southern woman and we always had darky servants. I took the
waitress with me, a quiet little mulatto we'd had for more than a year,
and sent for her mother, a very capable woman that I'd often used as
nurse in cases where they couldn't pay a professional. She could do
anything, the way those Southern darkies can, and she would cook and
look after things generally.
"Well, in three days it seemed as if I'd always been there. You know
how quickly a man manages a change like that; it's hard to see where
the women generate all the friction they make out of a move of that
sort. Althea was frying chicken contentedly and Mynie was sweeping and
dusting as quietly as she always did.
"She was a slender, oval-faced little yellow girl with almost straight
hair, parted and drawn down like a madonna's, very low voiced and
capable, with only one fault; she was almost too shy and always timid
that she'd make some blunder--which she seldom if ever did. She was
devoted to her mother, who had brought her up particularly well, and
delighted to be living with her. The patients all liked her and she
was especially tactful with children.
"One day, after I'd been there a week, I strolled out in the kitchen.
"'This strikes me as being a pretty good house, eh, Althea?' I said.
'New and clean. Everything all right?'
"'Yes, Dr. Stanchon, thank you, seh, it seems like a very good house,
seh,' she answered respectfully.
"'It's right surprisin' Mrs. Mears didn't like it!' says Mynie with a
little giggle.
"It struck me then that I had never known Mynie to speak, in her life,
without being spoken to, and even so, when I had occasion to speak to
her, she started and looked a little scared. I supposed living with
her mother had given her more confidence and felt rather glad of it.
"It might have been a week later one morning, as I leaned out of one of
the office windows to knock my pipe clean, I heard a low laughing and
murmuring on the side porch, and glancing carelessly in that direction,
what should I see but Mynie twisting the lapel of a young man's coat;
his arm was around her waist. It occurred to me that he was pretty
well dressed for any beau she'd be likely to have, and as he turned his
face partly, I realised with a disgusted surprise that it was George,
my colored office-man. It would be hard to make you feel the way I did
then, and you'll probably smile when I tell you that I couldn't have
been more shocked and startled if it had been any one of you--but it's
the truth.
"You see, George was a most exceptional fellow. Everybody in--in the
city I'm telling about--knew him and respected him. Everybody among my
patients knew that except for his colour he'd have been my regular
office assistant long ago. As it was, he knew more medicine than many
a lad with his gilt shingle up, and his English was perfect--he'd been
in school till he was eighteen and was a great reader. He'd come to me
as a coachman, but I soon saw his value and promoted him to the office,
where he took all the telephoning, received the patients, got out the
bills and kept all my accounts, personal and professional. He'd helped
me more than once in operations, and had a perfect genius for
administering anaesthetics. Nobody but our two selves knew what his
salary was, but I never grudged a penny of it. Why, the fellow read
French and German almost as well as I did, and tact--Lord, I wished
every day of my life I had George's tact and resource! My wife was
tremendously fond of him, and lent him all her books, and they used to
have great discussions on political economy and theosophy and prison
reform--oh, everything!
"He had lots of white blood, of course, and his wife you'd never guess
to be anything but pure American, she was so white. One of the
children, though, was black as my hat. The other had almost golden
hair and deep blue eyes--a beautiful little girl, brought up like a
duchess, too. They lived in a nice little house on the extreme edge of
the negro district, and we all understood that when the little girl was
fifteen or sixteen, she and her mother were going to move to Paris and
train her voice; then if everything went well, George and the boy would
join them and never come back--he was specialising in dentistry, mind
you, in his spare time. It's different, of course, abroad.
"I'm telling you all this, so you can see how I felt; I'd had George
nine years, and we'd always had darky servants, and--oh, well, to find
him with that yellow streak in him after all, nearly floored me. I
could have sworn he wasn't that sort of pup, and when he came in for
his orders I talked to him like a Dutch uncle.
"'You've got to stop this, George,' I said directly, 'I can't have any
such performances here. To tell you the truth, I never thought it of
you! The idea--a quiet little thing like Mynie! She's as timid as a
kitten and as innocent. Now I want your word of honour before you
leave this office and I want it quick!'
"He opened his mouth once or twice in a confused sort of way, looked at
me curiously, and then gave his word quietly. So far as I knew, he had
never broken it.
"But I wasn't satisfied with that and I spoke to her mother.
"'You'd better keep an eye on Mynie, Althea,' I said carelessly.
'She's a pretty girl, you know, and men aren't always too careful what
they say to a girl as pretty as Mynie.'
"'Yes, seh, I'll look out,' she said, 'I'll look out, doctor--ef I kin.
Seems like I may have trouble, though. Is Mis' Stanchon comin' back
soon, seh?'
"'Probably not,' I said. 'It's too hot for her here. Why, what's the
matter? Anything wrong?'
"'I guess not, seh,' she answered, hesitating. 'I try to do my best,
doctor. But I will sholy be glad when she comes back. And would you
mind to speak to Mynie yo'self, seh?' and she slipped away.
"Well, I did speak to her. I spoke when I ran across her, strolling
with George in a deserted walk of an old park. I called her right into
the office the next morning.
"'Mynie,' I said sharply, 'what were you doing yesterday afternoon?
Out with it!'
"She opened her eyes and looked full at me for a second--something she
had never done.
"'I reckon 'twas my afternoon out, doctor!' she said softly, and that
was all. But it was enough. It wouldn't have made any difference what
she said, anyhow--the look was enough. It wasn't the look of our shy
little Mynie; her eyes had never gone any farther than my breakfast
table and the office door. But these eyes were slanting, curious,
audacious--conscious. That's what it was, they were conscious of
something--something I didn't know. And for a quick moment I
remembered, with no connection, apparently, that queer look in the eyes
of the parson's wife--the one that had the house before. I didn't know
why, and I dismissed it as irrelevant, for that poor creature had been
frightened to death, and Mynie was more self-confident than I had ever
seen her and not at all pleasant with it. I've never been of a temper
to stand any nonsense from servants, and the class of Northern darky
that was growing up in that city wasn't always easy to deal with. But
I remembered what a sterling creature the mother was, and I tried to be
gentle with the girl.
"'You understand, Mynie,' I said temperately, 'I only speak for your
good. I know the world better than you can and I don't want to see you
get into bad ways. Do you want to lose George his place? You've got a
good home, and you're with your mother, and there's no excuse for you
if you slip up, you see. Understand me?'