BLACKER THAN SIN
It was the year after the yellow fever that Major Foxmaster moved out
from Virginia; that would make it the year 1876. And the next year the
woman came. For Major Foxmaster her coming was inopportune. It is
possible that she so timed it with that very thing in mind. To order her
own plans with a view to the upsetting and the disordering of his plans
may have been within the scope of her general scheme. Through intent,
perhaps, she waited until he had established himself here in his new
environment, five hundred miles from tidewater, before she followed him.
Be this as it may, that was what happened. The Major came out in the
spring of the year. He was pushing fifty then, a fine upstanding figure
of a man--what women, for lack of a better name, call distinguished
looking. He had been a lieutenant in the Mexican War and a major in the
Civil War--on the Confederate side, of course, seeing that he came from
the seaboard side and not from the mountainous flank of Virginia.
You get some notion of what manner of man he was when I tell you that in
all the years he lived in this city, which was a fair-sized city, only
one man ever called him by his first name. Behind his back he was to
others The Major, sometimes The Old Major, and rarely Major; but to his
face people always hailed him, properly, as Major Foxmaster. And,
despite the rôle he was to play in the community, he never acquired a
nickname; and that was not so strange, either. You give nicknames to
geysers, but not to glaciers.
This man's manner was icily formal toward those he deemed his inferiors,
icily polite toward those whom he acknowledged his equals. He had no
code for his intercourse with superiors because he never met anybody
whom he regarded as his social superior. He looked upon the world with a
bleak, chill eye, and to it he showed a bleak, chill face. It was a mask
really--a mask of flesh held in such fine and rigid control that it gave
no hint, ever, of what went on in the cool brain behind it. A
professional poker player would have traded five years out of his life
to be the owner of such a face.
Well, the Major came. He had money, he had family, he had a military
record; likewise he had the poise and the pose which, lacking all the
other things, still would have given him consideration and a place in
town life. His status in the financial world became fixed when he
deposited in the largest bank a drawing account of such size as
instantly to win the cuddling admiration of the president of the bank.
He had established himself in rooms at the Gaunt House--then, and for
many years thereafter, the principal hotel. Before fall he was proposed
for membership in the exclusive Kenilworth Club, that was the
unattainable Mecca toward which many men turned wistful eyes. Judge
Sherwan, who was afterward to be his only close friend, sponsored his
candidacy and he was elected promptly. Very soon his life fell into the
grooves that always thenceforward it was to follow.
The Major did not go into any business. Opportunities to go into this or
that were in due season presented to him. He listened with his air of
congealed courtesy, but declined them all, explaining that his present
investments were entirely satisfactory and yielded him a satisfactory
income. Like many men of his breed and generation, he liked a good horse
so well that it was more than a liking--with him it was a love.
Afternoons he frequently drove one: a ramping bay mare with a fractious
temper and a set of gifted heels. He was fond of cards, and in the
evenings generally played cards with certain of his fellow club members
in a private room at the Kenilworth Club.
These men, though, never became his friends, but were merely the men
with whom he played cards. If of a morning after breakfast he went for a
walk, as sometimes happened, he went alone, except on those infrequent
occasions when Judge Sherwan accompanied him. At the beginning he was
asked to affairs at the homes of influential people; but, since he never
accepted these invitations--any of them--people presently quit asking
him. Among a hundred thousand human beings he became, or rather he
remained, so far as interchange of thought, or of affection, or of
confidence, or of intimacy was concerned, a social Crusoe upon a desert
island set in an empty sea, with no Man Friday to bear him company in
his loneliness--unless it might be said that old Sherwan qualified,
after a fashion, for the Man-Friday job.
You see, the Major knew all along that--sooner or later--the woman would
be coming. For these few months he had played the truant from his
destiny, or his Nemesis, or his fate, or by whatever fancy name you
might choose to call it; but there was no chance of his having escaped
it altogether. Through strength of will power he could in silence
continue to endure it as he had in silence endured it through the years
that stretched-backward between young-manhood and middle age. Through
pride he would involve no other person, however remotely, in the sorry
web of his own weaving. Mentally he manoeuvred to stand apart from his
kind; to render himself as inaccessible, as aloof, as unknowable by
them as the core of an iceberg.
Nevertheless, it was inevitable that the channels of his outer life, no
matter how narrowly they ran or how coldly they coursed, would be
disturbed and set awry by her coming. A cultivated and well-sustained
indifference to popular opinion is all well enough, but gossip is a
corrosive that eats through the calluses until it finds quick flesh
underneath. The Major might arm himself against showing what he felt,
but he could not armour himself against feeling what he felt. He knew
it--and she knew it. Perhaps that was why she, this one time, delayed
her coming until he had ample opportunity for becoming, in a measure,
fixed in the community and identified with it.
She came. One morning in the young spring of the year following the year
when this narrative begins, Major Foxmaster stepped out from between the
tall pillars of the Gaunt House doorway to find her waiting for him upon
the sidewalk. She stood close to the curbing, a tall and straight
figure, swathed all in dead and dreary black, with black skirts hiding
her feet and trailing on the bricks behind her; with black gloves upon
her clasped hands; with a long, thick veil of black crêpe hiding her
face and the shape of her head, and descending, front and back, almost
to her waist--a striking figure and one to catch the eye.
After the first glance he gave no heed to her at all, nor she to
him--except that when he had descended the short flight of stone steps
and set off down the street at his usual brisk, soldierly gait, she
followed, ten paces in his rear. By reason of her skirts, which swept
the ground round her, and by reason, too, that her shoes had soles of
felt or of rubber, she seemed almost to float along the pavement behind
him, without apparent effort--certainly without sound.
Two blocks down the street he entered a business house. She waited
outside, as silent as a mute and as funereal as a pall. In a few minutes
he reappeared; she fell in behind him. He crossed over to the other
side; she crossed, too, maintaining the distance between them. Crossing,
his heels hit hard upon the rutted cobbles of the roadway; but she
glided over them noiselessly and smoothly, almost like one who walked on
water. He went into the Kenilworth Club and for an hour or two sat in
the reading room behind a newspaper. Had he raised his eyes he might
have seen, through the window, the woman waiting on the curb. He ate his
luncheon there in the club at a table in a corner of the dining room,
alone, as was his way. It was two o'clock and after before he left to go
to the livery stable where he kept his mare. She followed, to wait
outside the livery stable until he had driven away in his gig, bound for
the trotting track where the city's horse fanciers exercised their
harness stock.
For a space, then, she disappeared. Having returned the rig to its
quarters and having dined at the Gaunt House, the Major came forth once
more at eight-thirty o'clock to return to the Kenilworth for a bout at
the cards. He was spruced and for the second time that day he had
shaved. Plainly his measured and customary habit of life was to go on
just as it had gone on before the woman came--or, rather, it might be
said that it was only now reassuming the routine which, with breaks in
between, it had pursued through so many years. Major Foxmaster came down
the steps, drawing on his gloves. From the deeper darkness beyond a
patch of yellowish glow where a gas lamppost stood the woman emerged,
appearing now as an uncertain, wavering shape in her black swathings.
Again she followed him, at a distance of a few paces, to the Kenilworth
Club; again she waited in the shadows cast by its old-fashioned portico
while he played his game and, at its end, cashed in his winnings--for
the Major won that night, as very often he did; again she followed him
homeward at midnight through the silent and empty street. Without a word
or a sign or a backward glance he ascended the steps and passed within
the doors of the Gaunt House. Without a word or a sign she lingered
until he had disappeared; then she turned off the pavement into the road
and vanished, swimming away upright, as it were, without visible motion
of her limbs or her body, into a stilled and waveless sea of darkness.
I have here set down the story of this day with such detail because,
with occasional small variations, it was to be the story of an uncounted
number of other days coming after it.
Inside of twenty-four hours the whole city knew the tale, and buzzed and
hummed with it. Inside of forty-eight hours the woman, by common
consent, had been given the names she was ever thereafter to wear. She
was, to some, The Woman in Black; to others, Foxmaster's Shadow. Inside
of a week or two the town was to know, by word of mouth passed on from
this person to that, and by that person to another, all that it was ever
to know of her.
She came from the same place whence he came--a small Virginia town
somewhere near the coast. As the current reports ran, the Foxmaster
plantation and the plantation of her family adjoined; as
children--remember, I am still quoting the account that was generally
accepted--they had played together; as young man and young woman they
had been sweethearts. He wronged her and then denied her marriage. Her
father was dead; she had no brothers and no near male relatives to
exact, at the smaller end of a pistol, satisfaction from the seducer. So
she dedicated her days and nights to the task of haunting him with the
constant reminder of his crime and her wrongs. She clad herself in
black, with a veil before her face to hide it, as one in mourning for a
dead life; and she set herself to following him wherever he might go.
She never spoke to him; she never, so far as the world at large knew,
wrote to him nor meddled in any fashion whatsoever with him or his
affairs--but she followed him.
The war, coming on, broke for four years the continuity of her
implacable plan of vengeance. When the war was over, and he came back
home, she took it up again. He left the town where he had been reared
and moved to Richmond, and then after a time from Richmond to Baltimore;
in due season she followed after. Finally he had moved to this more
westerly city, lying on the border between the North and the South. And
now here she was too.
Through an agent in Virginia she had leased, ready furnished, the old
Gresham place, diagonally across the way from the front entrance of the
Gaunt House; that fact speedily came out, proving that, like him, she
also had means of her own. Through this same agent the taxes were
thereafter paid. Presumably she moved in under cover of night, for she
was a figure that, once seen, was not to be forgotten; and most
certainly no one could remember having seen her before that fine spring
morning when Major Foxmaster came out of the Gaunt House to find her
waiting for him.
She had brought her servants with her--a middle-aged mulatto man and his
wife, a tall, young, coal-black negro woman; both of them as
close-mouthed as only some negroes can be, when they are the exceptions
to prove the rule of a garrulous race. The mulatto man was a combination
of butler and gardener. It was he who did the marketing, dealing with
the tradespeople and paying all the bills. The negro woman was the cook,
presumably. Passers-by rarely saw her. These two, with their mistress,
composed the household.
For such a mistress and such a household the old Gresham place made a
most fit abiding place. It was one of those houses that seemed builded
for the breeding of mysteries and the harbouring of tragedies--the kind
of house that cannot stand vacant long without vaguely acquiring the
reputation of being haunted. It was a big, foursquare house of greyish
stone, placed in the exact centre of a narrow, treeless lot, which
extended through for the full depth of the city block. In front of it
was a high picketed fence and a deep, bare grassplot; behind it was a
garden of sorts, with a few stunted and illy-nourished berry bushes; and
on each side of it was a brick wall, so high that the sunshine never
fell on the earth at the side of the house toward the north; and even in
the hottest summer weather the foundation stones there were slick and
sweaty with the damp, and big snails crawled on the brick wall that ran
in the shadow of the wall, leaving trails of a luminous slime across the
slick greenish mould which covered the bricks.
The woman took this house, with its gear and garnishings, just as the
last of the Greshams had left it when he died. During the months and
years it remained tenantless all the upper windows had been tightly
shuttered; she left them so. In the two lower front windows, which
flanked the deeply recessed front door and which lacked blinds, were
stiff, heavy shades of a dull silver colour, drawn down until only a
glassed space of inches showed between their unfringed ends and the
stone copings. These, too, were left as they had been. They accorded
well with the blank, cold house itself; they matched in with its drear
old face; they made you think of coins on a dead man's eyes.
This house, as I have said, stood almost opposite the Gaunt House. What
went on within it no outsider ever knew, for no outsider ever crossed
its threshold--to this good day no outsider ever has known; but every
day its door opened to let out its draped and veiled mistress, setting
forth on her business, which was to follow Major Foxmaster; and every
night, when that day's business was done, it opened again to let her
back in. In time the town grew used to the sight; it never grew tired of
talking about it.
As for Major Foxmaster, he would dodge about the country no more; for,
in the long run or the short, dodging availed him nothing. The years
behind him proved that. He would bide where he was until death, which
was the supreme handicapper, named the winner of this, the last heat of
their strange match. He would outlive her and be free; else she would
outlive him, to see her long-famished hatred sated. And he wondered
whether, if he died first, she, in her black mourning, would dog his
dead body to the grave as she had dogged his living steps! It was a
morbid fancy and, perhaps because it was morbid, it found a lodgment in
the Major's mind, recurring to him again and again. The existence that
he--and she--had willed him to lead was not conducive to an entirely
healthy mental aspect.
Whatever his thoughts were, he betrayed none of them to the rest of
creation. Exactly as before she appeared, so he continued to deport
himself. His behaviour showed no change. He took his walks, drove his
bay filly, played his cards at the Kenilworth. He carried his head as
high as ever; he snapped his military heels down as firmly as ever on
the stones of the street and the bricks of the sidewalk. With a pair of
eyes that were as inscrutable and yet as clear as two bits of hard blue
ice, and with a face like a square of chipped flint, he went his daily
and his hourly way, outwardly oblivious to the stares of acquaintance
and stranger alike, seeming not to know that ten paces in his rear, or
twelve, came drifting this erect veiled shape which was clad all in dead
black--as black as sin, as black as his sin had been, as black as her
misery had been--the incarnate embodiment of her shame and his.
In fair weather as in foul, in blistering midsummer and blizzardy
midwinter, daytime and nighttime, she followed him. If she lost the
trail she waited in all patience until he reappeared. She seemed
tireless and hungerless. Wet or cold or heat seemed not to affect her.
In her grim pursuit of him her spirit rose triumphant above the calls of
the flesh. At midnight, after a long vigil outside the Kenilworth, she
moved behind him with the same swift, noiseless, floating motion that
marked her in the morning. And so it went with these two.
If he did not notice her presence, neither did he seek ever to elude
her. If he never spoke to her, neither did he speak of her to others. As
for the woman, she never spoke to any one at all. Outside the walls of
the house where she lived her voice was never heard and her face was
never seen. Only one person ever dared speak to the Major of her.
Old Sherwan himself did not dare. Of all human beings he stood nearest
to the Major. If the Major might be said to have an intimate Judge
Sherwan was the one. Moreover, he, Sherwan, was by way of being a
he-gossip, which of all the created breeds of gossips is the most
persistent and the most consistent, the most prying and, therefore, the
most dangerous. He yearned for the smell of impropriety as a drug-fiend
yearns for his drug. His was a brackish old soul and from its soured
depths he dearly loved to spew up the bilge waters of scandal. The
pumps leading to that fouled hold were always in good order. Give him
the inch of fact and he would guarantee to provide the ell of surmise
and innuendo. Grown too old to sin actually he craved to sin
vicariously--to balance always on the edge of indiscretion, since he no
longer plunged into it bodily.
Wherefore, after the woman came and the first shock of her coming wore
off, he made a point of being seen in Major Foxmaster's company as much
as possible. The share of notoriety the association brought him was dear
to his withered, slack-valved old heart. In his manner and his look, in
the very way he cocked his hat and waggled his stiffened legs, you
discerned that he wished to divide with his friend the responsibility
for the presence of his friend's trailing shadow.
But, for all this and all that, he did not dare ever to speak of her to
Major Foxmaster. Joel Bosler dared to, though, he being one of the
meagre-minded breed proverbially reputed to go rushing in where angels
fear to tread. This Joel Bosler was a policeman; his beat included the
Gaunt House corner and both sides of the street upon which the Gaunt
House fronted. He was a kindly enough creature; a long slab-pole of a
man, with the face of an old buck sheep. For some reason--which he least
of all could fathom--Joel Bosler had contracted a vague sort of
attachment for the Major. They met occasionally on the sidewalk outside
the hotel; and, since the Major always responded with iced and
ceremonial politeness to the policeman's salute, it may have been that
this, to Bosler's limited mind, was proof of a friendly understanding
existing between them.
One day, about a month after the woman moved into the old Gresham place,
Bosler, having first scratched his head assiduously for a space of
minutes to stimulate the thought, was moved to invade the Gaunt House
lobby and send his name upstairs to the Major's rooms. A negro bell boy
brought word back that the Major would be very glad to see Policeman
Bosler, and Policeman Bosler accordingly went up. The Major was in the
sitting room of his suite of rooms on the second floor. Bosler, bowing,
came in and shut the door behind him with an elaborate carefulness.
"Good morning, sir?" said Major Foxmaster formally, with the note of
polite interrogation in his tone; and then, as Bosler stood fingering
his blue cap and shuffling his feet: "Well, sir; well?"
"Major Foxmaster, suh," began Bosler, "I--er--I kinder wanted to say
somethin' to you privatelike."
He halted lamely. Before the daunting focus of those frigid blue eyes
his speech, carefully rehearsed beforehand, was slipping away from him.
"Except for ourselves, there is no one within hearing," stated the
Major. "Kindly proceed--if you will be so good."
"Well, suh," faltered Bosler, fumbling his words out--"well, suh, Major
Foxmaster, it's this-a-way: I've been--been a-thinkin' it over; and if
this here lady--this woman that wears black all the time--the one that's
moved into the old Gresham place acrost the street--if she pesters you
any by follerin' you round every wheres, the way she does--I thought I'd
be very glad--if you said the word--to warn her to quit it, else
I'd--I'd have to take steps agin her by law or somethin'. And so--and
so----" He stopped altogether. He had been chilled at the moment of his
entrance; now he was frozen mentally to below the zero point.
The Major spoke, and his syllables battered on Joel Bosler's unprotected
head like hailstones.
"Have you ever observed that the person to whom you refer has spoken to
me?" he demanded.
"No, suh; but----"
"Or ever molested me in any way?"
"Oh, no, suh; but, you see----"
"Have you ever observed that I spoke to her?"
"No, suh; but----"
"Have you any reason for believing, of your own knowledge, that she
knows me?"
"Well, suh, I----"
"Or that I am acquainted with her?"
"Well, I----"
"Then, sir, since she is minding her own business and I am minding my
own business, I suggest that you take pattern by such examples and
cultivate the habit of minding your own business. Kindly do not address
me hereafter upon this subject--or any other. I find your conversation
singularly unattractive. Good day, sir!"
Policeman Joel Bosler had no recollection afterward of having withdrawn
himself. He presently found himself downstairs in the lobby, and, a
little later on, outside the hotel, upon his regular beat. How he got
there or how long it took him to get there he could not, with any degree
of certainty, say.
Presently, though, he saw the Major issue forth from the Gaunt House
door. And as the Major's foot descended upon the first step of the
flight leading down to the street level, the gate of the old Gresham
place across the way clicked, and here came the cloaked, veiled woman,
floating noiselessly across the road to follow him.
Joel Bosler, still in a state of intellectual numbness, watched them as
they passed down the street--the Major striding on ahead, the gliding
woman ten paces behind him. He had witnessed the same sight perhaps
thirty times before. In days to come he was to witness it hundreds of
times more; but always he watched it and never grew weary of watching
it. Nor did the eyes of the rest of the town weary of watching it.
And so the thing went on.
* * * * *
The years went by. Five of them went by. Ten of them went by. A new
generation was growing up, coming into manhood and womanhood. An old
generation was thinning out and dying off. The Gaunt House was no longer
the best hotel in the city. It was the second best and, before very
long, was to be the third best. Tall business houses--six, seven, eight,
nine stories tall--shouldered up close to it; and they dwarfed it,
making it seem squatty and insignificant, whereas before it had loomed
massive and monument-high, dominating the corner and the rest of the
block. Once the cobbled road before its doors had clinked to the
heel-taps of smart carriage horses. Now it thundered clamorously beneath
the broad iron-shod tires of dray and vans.
The old Gresham place, diagonally across the way, looked much as it had
always looked; indeed, there was not much about it, exteriorly speaking,
to undergo change. Maybe the green mould in the damp, slick walk at its
northern side was a little bit greener and a little bit thicker; and
maybe, in summer, the promenading snails were a trifle more numerous
there. The iron gate, set in the middle breadth of the iron fence,
lolled inward upon one rusted hinge, after the fashion of a broken wing.
The close-drawn shades in the two lower front windows had faded from a
tarnished silver colour to a dulled leaden colour; and one of them--the
one on the right-hand side--had pulled away and awry from its fastenings
above and was looped down, hanging at a skewed angle behind the dirtied
and crusted panes, as though one of the coins had slipped halfway off
the dead man's eyelids. People persistently called it the old Gresham
place, naming it so when they pointed it out to strangers and told them
the tale of its veiled chatelaine and her earthly mission.
For, you know, Major Foxmaster's shadow still followed after Major
Foxmaster. Long before, these two had been accepted as verities; it
might now be said of them that they had become institutional--inevitable
fixtures, with orbits permanent and assured in the swing of community
life. In the presence of this pair some took a degree of pride, bragging
when away from home that they came from the town where so strange a
sight might forever be seen, and when at home bringing visitors and
chance acquaintances to this corner of the town in order to show it to
these others.
Along with this morbid pride in a living tragedy ran a sort of
undercurrent of sympathy for its actors. From the beginning there had
been pity for the woman who, the better everlastingly to parade her
shame, hid her face eternally from the light of day; and in possibly a
more limited circle there had been abundant pity for the man as well.
Settling down to watch the issue out, the town, from the outset, had
respected the unbendable, unbreakable fortitude of the man, and
respected, also, the indomitable persistency of the woman.
For a variety of very self-evident reasons no one had ever or would ever
meddle in the personal affairs of Major Foxmaster. For reasons that were
equally good, though perhaps not so easy to define in words, none
meddled with her either. Street gamins feared to jeer her as she passed,
without knowing exactly why they feared.
In these ten years the breaks in the strange relationship had been few
and short. Once a year, on an average, the Major made short trips back
to Virginia, presumably upon business pertaining to his estate and his
investments. Such times the woman was not seen abroad. Once, in '79, for
a week, and once again, just following the great blizzard of '81, she
was missed for a few days; and people wondered whether she was ailing or
housebound, or what. For those days the Major walked without his shadow.
Then the swathed figure reappeared, tracking him about as before.
Time undeniably was working its changed with Major Foxmaster, as with
his surroundings. He must be about sixty now; but, seeing him for the
first time, you might have been pardoned for setting him down as a man
of seventy or thereabouts--he looked it. His shoulders, which formerly
he carried squared back so splendidly, were beginning to fold in upon
the casing of his ribs. His hair used to be black, shot with white
hairs; it was now white, shot with a few black hairs. His back had had
a hollow in it; there was a curve in it yet, but the curve was outward
instead of inward. When a man's figure develops convex lines where there
used to be concavities, that man is getting on; and the Major plainly
was getting on pretty fast. His eyes, which remained dignifiedly and
defiantly scornful of all the world, and of all the world might think
and might say, nevertheless were filmed over the least bit, so that they
lost something of their icy blue keenness. His face, though, with the
jaws sinking in upon the shrunken gums and the brows growing shaggier,
was as much of a mask as it had ever been.
What was true of Major Foxmaster was seemingly not true of her who
followed him. Within the flapping shapelessness of her disguise her
figure showed as straight and supple as in the beginning, and her
noiseless step was as nimble and quick as ever it had been. And that was
a mighty strange thing too. It was as though her shroud of wrappings,
which kept the sunshine and the wind off her, kept off age too.
This very same thought came at length into Major Foxmaster's head. It
took lodgment there and sprouted, sending out roots into all the odd
corners of his mind. It is not for me to tell why or how he got this
notion, or exactly when. It is for me merely to narrate as briefly as
may be the progress of the obsession and its consequences.
* * * * *
Another five years passed, and then three, making eight more on top of
the first ten. Major Foxmaster was crowding seventy; he looked eighty.
Men and women who had been children when he moved out from Virginia were
themselves almost face to face with impending middle age and had
children of their own growing up, who, in their turn, would hear the
story of Major Foxmaster's shadow and bear it forward into yet another
generation. The stone copings above the Gaunt House door were sooty
black with the accretions of decades; for this was a soft-coal town, and
factories, with tall chimneys that constantly vomited out greasy black
smoke, had crept up, taking the old hotel by flank and by rear. The
broken shade in the right-hand lower front window of the old Gresham
place, across the way, was gone altogether, having parted its rotted
fabric from its decayed fastenings; so the bleak, bare face of the house
winked with one dead eye and stared with the other.
The crotchety bay mare was long gone to the bone yard. Her hide was
chair bottoms and her gristles were glue; and out on the trotting track
wealthy young bloods of the town exercised her get and her skittish
grand-get. The Major did not drive a harness nag any more--he had a
palsy of the hands and a stoop of the spine; but in most regards he
adhered to the old habits. He took his daily constitutionals--sometimes
alone--except, of course, for the tagging black shape behind
him--oftener with the octogenarian Sherwan; and of evenings he played
his poker games at the Kenilworth Club, which, after the way of
ultraconservative clubs, stood fast on its original site, even though
the neighbourhood about it was so distressfully altered. His heels had
quit ringing against the sidewalk; instead, his legs lifted tremulously
and his feet felt for a purchase on the earth when he set them down.
His face was no longer chipped grey flint; it was a chalk-white, with
deep lines in it. The gold-headed cane of ebony wood, which he carried
always, had ceased to be an ornament to his gait and had become a
necessary prop to his step. His jaws sagged in until there were deep
recesses at the corners of his mouth; and there, in those little hollow
places, the spittle would accumulate in tiny patches. Possibly, by
reason of the bleary casts that had overspread them, his eyes--still the
faithfully inscrutable peepholes of his brain--gave no betrayal of the
racking thoughts behind them. They were racking thoughts too. The
delusion was a mania now--a besetting mania, feeding on silence and
isolation, colouring and tincturing all the processes of his intellect.
By years--so he reasoned it out with himself in every waking hour--by
years, she who bided within that shuttered house over the way was his
age, or near it. By rights, her draped form should be as shrunken and
warped as his own. By rights, the face behind that thick black veil
should be as old as his, and bleached, moreover, to a corpsey paleness.
Yet the furtive glances he stole over his shoulder told him that the
figure behind him moved as alertly erect as ever it had; that its
movements had the same sure and silent swiftness.
So that, after a while, Major Foxmaster began to think things that no
entirely sane man has any business thinking. He began to say to himself
that now he had solved the secret which, all these years, had been kept
from his ken. A curse had been put upon him--that was it; that must be
it! Behind that veil was no face old and sunken and wasted as his was,
but, instead, a young, plump face, with luminous grey eyes set in it,
and a sweet, full mouth, and about it wavings of lustrous, rich brown
hair--the face of the girl he once loved as she looked in the days
before he quit loving her.
He held up his own hands before his watery eyes. They were trembly,
wrinkled hands, gnarled in their knuckles, corded on their backs. They
were the colour of scorched leather--the texture of it too. But hers
must be the plump little white hands he remembered, with rosy-pink palms
and bright, pointed nails. Before a long mirror in his dressing room he
studied himself--studied his bowed back and his hunching shoulders and
his shaky shanks--and all. Her figure, inside its flapping black
draperies, was straight as an arrow; her head poised itself firmly
upright on her shoulders. That much at least he knew; so if that much
were true, why was not the rest of it true too?
It was not fair! According to his lights he had fought out the fight
with only such weapons as Nature and his own will gave him; but the
Supreme Handicapper had stacked the cards against him. He was bound to
lose the long, long race. He could not last much longer. He could feel
age tugging at every flabby muscle; infirmity was forever fingering his
tissues, seeking the most vulnerable spot at which to strike in at him.
He would lie down and die. And not until then--not until the last rattle
of breath had scaped out of his collapsing windpipe; not until she,
still triumphantly active and alert and youthful, still cloaked and
gloved and hooded, had followed his sapped, empty shell to the
graveyard--would she surrender and shrivel into her rightful semblance,
growing old and feeble in an hour or in a day. It was not fair--this
conjury business! From the beginning he never had a chance to win. All
the days of his manhood he had walked with a living nightmare. Why, in
dying, should he be doomed to point the moral of a living ghost tale?
First he told himself it could not be true; that it was a hideous
imagination born of his broodings. This was the fag-end of the
nineteenth century in which he lived, when supernatural events did not
happen. Then he told himself it must be true--the testimony before his
eyes proved the fact of what he could not see. Then something happened
which, as far as Major Foxmaster was concerned, settled the issue.
On a winter night, after rough weather, the Major came feebly out of the
Kenilworth Club, groping his way and muttering to himself. This habit of
muttering to himself was one that had come on him just lately.
There were patches of ice upon the sidewalk, and the wind, like a lazy
housewife, had dusted the snow back into corners and under projections.
Between the porticoes of the doorway his foot slipped on one of these
little ice patches. He threw out his gloved left hand to catch at some
support and his fingers closed on her black-clad arm, where she had
drawn herself into the shelter and shadow of the door-arch to await his
appearance.
For the first time in nearly fifty years he touched her.
He jerked his hand back and fled away at a staggering, crippling run;
and, as he ran to hide himself within his rooms, in panting gulps he
blasphemed the name of his Maker; for to his feel her flesh, through the
thick cloth sleeve on her arm, had seemed to him to be as firm and plump
as it had felt when he was twenty-two and she was twenty. The evidence
was complete.
* * * * *
All through the next day he kept himself behind closed doors, wrestling
with his torments; but in the evening old Sherwan came for him and he
dressed himself. They started out together, a doddering, tottering
twain; suggesting, when they halted for a moment to rest at the foot of
the office stairs, a pair of grey locust husks from which age,
spider-fashion, had sucked out all the rich juices of health and
strength; suggesting, when they went on again, a pair of crawling sick
beetles which, though sick, still could crawl a little.
Side by side they crossed the tarnished, shabby old lobby, with its
clumpings of dingy grey pillars and its red-plush sofa seats, and, in
the centre, its rotunda mounting to the roof, up floor by floor, in
spiral rings that in perspective graduated smaller and smaller, like an
inverted funnel; and side by side they issued forth from beneath the
morguelike copings of the outer door and descended the Gaunt House
steps--Major Foxmaster feeling ahead of him with his cane, and Judge
Sherwan patting his left breast with his open hand--just as Policeman
Joel Bosler, now dead and gone, had seen them do upon many another such
evening as this. Promptly and inevitably befell another thing, then,
which likewise the late deceased Bosler had witnessed times without
number.
From the darker space beyond the corner lamp-post, out into the gassy
yellow circle of radiance, appeared the straight, gliding black form,
advancing on silent, padded feet and without visible effort,
relentlessly to follow after them wheresoever they might choose to go.
So, then, at sight of the familiar apparition the icy shell of half a
century thawed and broke to bits and was washed away in a freshet of
agony; and to his one friend, for one moment, Major Foxmaster bared his
wrung and tortured soul. He threw down his cane and threw up his arms.
"Sherwan," he shrieked out, "I can't stand it any longer--I can't stand
it! It's killing me! I must look at the face--I must know!"
With a sudden frenzied energy he darted at the cloaked shape. It
hesitated, shrinking back from his onward rush as though daunted; but he
fixed his clutching fingers in the crêpe veil and tore it in twisted
rags from the front of its wearer, and the light shone full on the face
revealed beneath the close black hood of the bonnet. ... He gave one
blubbery, slobbered, hideous yell and fell flat at the base of the
lamp-post.
Old Sherwan saw the face too. Swollen and strengthened with senile rage,
he seized the figure by both its arms and shook it.
"You hussy! You wench! You Jezebel! You she-devil!" he howled at the top
of his cracked voice, and rocked his prisoner to and fro. "What's this?
What does this mean, you hell spawn?"
A dart of pain nipped at his diseased heart then, and closed his throat.
For a moment, without words, they struggled together. With a heave of
her supple arms she broke his hold. She shoved him off from her and
reared back on her heels, breathing hard--a full-blooded negress, with
chalky popeyes and thick, purplish lips that curled away in a wide snarl
from the white teeth, and a skin that was blacker than sin.
"Whut does hit mean?" she answered; and, through stress of fear and
mounting hope and exultation, her voice rose to a camp-meeting shout:
"I tells you whut hit means: Hit means Ise Minnie Brownell, Ole Miss'
cook. Hit means Ole Miss is been daid 'mos' fo'teen years--ever sence
she taken down sick endurin' de big blizzard. Hit means dat w'en she lay
a-dyin' she put de promise onto me to bury her in secret; an' den to put
on her clo'es an' to foller, walkin' behine dat man, daytime an'
nighttime, twell he died. Dat's whut hit means!"
She sought to peer past him and her tone sharpened down, fine and keen:
"Is he daid? Oh, bless de good Lawd A'mighty! Is he daid? 'Cause, ef
he's daid, me an' Hennery, w'ich is my lawful wedded husban', we kin go
back to Furginia an' claim de prop'ty dat Ole Miss lef in trust to come
to me w'en I kin prove he's daid. Oh, look, please, suh, mister, and see
ef he ain't dead?"
Old Sherwan ran to the lamp-post and dropped down on both his knees, and
shook his friend by the shoulders.
"Foxmaster!" he called. "Foxmaster, you're free! You're free! I tell
you, you're free! Foxmaster, look at me! Foxmaster, do you hear me?
You're free, I tell you!"
But the Major did not hear him. The Major was flat on his back, with his
arms outstretched and the fingers of both his hands gripped in the rags
of a black crêpe veil; and at the corners of his mouth the little
patches of spittle bubbles were drying up. The Major would never hear
anything again in this world.