Chapter 5

“I should not think you would want to do that,” said the girl, seriously.

“No, one oughtn’t to neglect an investment.”

“I don’t mean that. But if such a thing had happened to me, there, I should want to go again and again.”

“You mean the apparition? Did I tell you how I had always had the expectation that I should see it again, and perhaps understand it? But when I had behaved so shabbily about it, I began to feel that it would not come again.”

“If I were in your place,” said the girl, “I should never give up; I should spend my whole life trying to find out what it meant.”

“Ah!” he sighed. “I wish you could put yourself in my place.”

“I wish I could,” she returned, intensely.

They looked into each other’s faces.

“Miss Hernshaw,” he demanded, solemnly, “do you really like people to say what they think?”

“Of course I do!”

“Then I wish you would come to St. Johnswort with me!”

“Would that do?” she asked. “If Mrs. Rock--”

He saw how far she was from taking his meaning, but he pushed on. “I don’t want Mrs. Rock. I want you--you alone. Don’t you understand me? I love you. I--of course it’s ridiculous! We’ve only met three or four times in our lives, but I knew this as well the first moment as I do now. I knew it when you came walking across the garden that morning, and I haven’t known it any better since, and I couldn’t in a thousand years. But of course--”

“Sit down,” she said, wafting herself into a chair, and he obeyed her. “I should have to tell my father,” she began.

“Why, certainly,” and he sprang to his feet again.

She commanded him to his chair with an imperative gesture. “I have got to find out what I think, first, myself. If I were sure that I loved you--but I don’t know. I believe you are good. I believed that when they were all joking you there at breakfast, and you took it so nicely; I have _always_ believed that you were good.”

She seemed to be appealing to him for confirmation, but he could not very well say that she was right, and he kept silent. “I didn’t like your telling that story at the dinner, and I said so; and then I went and did the same thing, or worse; so that I have nothing to say about that. And I think you have behaved very nobly to Mr. St. John.” As if at some sign of protest in Hewson, she insisted, “Yes, I do! But all this doesn’t prove that I love you.” Again she seemed to appeal to him, and this time he thought he might answer her appeal.

“I couldn’t prove that _I_ love _you_, but I feel sure of it.”

“And do you believe that we ought to take our feelings for a guide?”

“That’s what people do,” he ventured, with the glimmer of a smile in his eyes, which she was fixing so earnestly with her own.

“I am not satisfied that it is the right way,” she answered. “If there is really such a thing as love there ought to be some way of finding it out besides our feelings. Don’t you think it’s a thing we ought to talk sensibly about?”

“Of all things in the world; though it isn’t the custom.”

Miss Hernshaw was silent for a moment. Then she said, “I believe I should like a little time.”

“Oh, I didn’t expect you to answer me at once,--I”

“But if you are going to Europe?”

“I needn’t go to Europe at all. I can go to St. Johnswort, and wait for your answer there.”

“It might be a good while,” she urged. “I should want to tell my father that I was thinking about it, and he would want to see you before he approved.”

“Why, of course!”

“Not,” she added, “that it would make any difference, if I was sure of it myself. He has always said that he would not try to control me in such a matter, and I think he would like you. I do like you very much myself, Mr. Hewson, but I don’t think it would be right to say I loved you unless I could prove it.”

Hewson was tempted to say that she could prove it by marrying him, but he had not the heart to mock a scruple which he felt to be sacred. What he did say was: “Then I will wait till you can prove it. Do you wish me not to see you again, before you have made up your mind?”

“I don’t know. I can’t see what harm there would be in our meeting.” “No, I can’t, either,” said Hewson, as she seemed to refer the point to him. “Should you mind my coming again, say, this evening?”

“To-night?” She reflected a moment. “Yes, come to-night.”

When he came after dinner, Hewson was sensible from the perfect unconsciousness of Mrs. Rock’s manner that Miss Hernshaw had been telling her. Her habit of a wandering eye, contributed to the effect she wished to produce, if this were the effect, and her success was such that it might easily have deceived herself. But when Mrs. Rock, in a supreme exercise of her unconsciousness, left him with the girl for a brief interval before it was time for him to go, Miss Hernshaw said, “Mrs. Rock knows about it, and she says that the best way for me to find out will be to try whether I can live without you.”

“Was that Mrs. Rock’s idea?” asked Hewson, as gravely as he could.

“No it was mine; I suggested it to her; but she approves of it. Don’t you like it?”

“Yes. I hope I sha’n’t die while you are trying to live without me. Shall you be very long?” She frowned, and he hastened to say, “I do like your idea; it’s the best way, and I thank you for giving me a chance.”

“We are going out to my father’s ranch in Colorado, at once,” she explained. “We shall start to-morrow morning.”

“Oh! May I come to see you off?”

“No, I would rather begin at once.”

“May I write to you?”

“I will write to you--when I’ve decided.”

She gave him her hand, but she would not allow him to keep it for more than farewell, and then she made him stay till Mrs. Rock came back, and take leave of her too; he had frankly forgotten Mrs. Rock, who bade him adieu with averted eyes, and many civilities about seeing him again. She could hardly have been said to be seeing him then.

XIV.

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.

XV.

After his marriage, which took place without needless delay, Hewson returned with his wife to spend their honey-moon at St. Johnswort. The honey-moon prolonged itself during an entire year, and in this time they contrived so far to live down its reputation of being a haunted house that they were able to conduct their _ménage_ on the ordinary terms. They themselves never wished to lose the sense of something supernatural in the place, and were never quite able to accept the actual conditions as final. That is to say, Rosalie was not, for she had taken Hewson’s apparition under her peculiar care, and defended it against even his question. She had a feeling (it was scarcely a conviction) that if he believed more strenuously in the validity of his apparition as an authorized messenger from the unseen world it would yet come again and declare its errand. She could not accept the theory that if such a thing actually happened it could happen for nothing at all, or that the reason of its occurrence could be indefinitely postponed. She was impatient of that, as often as he urged the possibility, and she wished him to use a seriousness of mind in speaking of his apparition which should form some sort of atonement to it for his past levity, though since she had taken his apparition into her keeping he had scarcely hazarded any suggestion concerning it; in fact it had become so much her apparition that he had a fantastic reluctance from meddling with it.

“You are always requiring a great occasion for it,” he said, at last. “What greater event could it have foreshadowed or foreshown, than that which actually came to pass?”

“I don’t understand you, Arthur,” she said, letting her hand creep into his, where it trembled provisionally as they sat together in the twilight.

“Why, that was the day I first saw you.”

“Now, you are laughing!” she said, pulling her hand away.

“Indeed, I’m not! I couldn’t imagine anything more important than the union of our lives. And if that was what the apparition meant to portend it could not have intimated it by a more noble and impressive behavior. Simply to be there, and then to be gone, and leave the rest to us! It was majestic, it was--delicate!”

“Yes, it was. But it was too much, for it was out of proportion. A mere earthly love-affair--” “Is it merely for earth?”

“Oh, husband, I hope you don’t think so! I wanted you to say you didn’t. And if you don’t think so, yes, I’ll believe it came for that!”

“You may be sure I don’t think so.”

“Then I know it will come again.”

* * * * *

THE ANGEL OF THE LORD.

I.

“All that sort of personification,” said Wanhope, “is far less remarkable than the depersonification which has now taken place so thoroughly that we no longer think in the old terms at all. It was natural that the primitive peoples should figure the passions, conditions, virtues, vices, forces, qualities, in some sort of corporal shape, with each a propensity or impulse of its own, but it does not seem to me so natural that the derivative peoples should cease to do so. It is rational that they should do so, and I don’t know that any stronger proof of our intellectual advance could be alleged than the fact that the old personifications survive in the parlance while they are quite extinct in the consciousness. We still talk of death at times as if it were an embodied force of some kind, and of love in the same way; but I don’t believe that any man of the commonest common-school education thinks of them so. If you try to do it yourself, you are rather ashamed of the puerility, and when a painter or a sculptor puts them in an objective shape, you follow him with impatience, almost with contempt.”

“How about the poets?” asked Minver, less with the notion, perhaps, of refuting the psychologist than of bringing the literary member of our little group under the disgrace that had fallen upon him as an artist.

“The poets,” said I, “are as extinct as the personifications.”

“That’s very handsome of you, Acton,” said the artist. “But go on, Wanhope.”

“Yes, get down to business,” said Rulledge. Being of no employ whatever, and spending his whole life at the club in an extraordinary idleness, Rulledge was always using the most strenuous expressions, and requiring everybody to be practical. He leaned directly forward with the difficulty that a man of his girth has in such a movement, and vigorously broke off the ash of his cigar against the edge of his saucer. We had been dining together, and had been served with coffee in the Turkish room, as it was called from its cushions and hangings of Indian and Egyptian stuffs. “What is the instance you’ve got up your sleeve?” He smoked with great energy, and cast his eyes alertly about as if to make sure that there was no chance of Wanhope’s physically escaping him, from the corner of the divan, where he sat pretty well hemmed in by the rest of us, spreading in an irregular circle before him.

“You unscientific people are always wanting an instance, as if an instance were convincing. An instance is only suggestive; a thousand instances, if you please, are convincing,” said the psychologist. “But I don’t know that I wish to be convincing. I would rather be enquiring. That is much more interesting, and, perhaps, profitable.”

“All the same,” Minver persisted, apparently in behalf of Rulledge, but with an after-grudge of his own, “you’ll allow that you were thinking of something in particular when you began with that generalization about the lost art of personifying?”

“Oh, that is very curious,” said the psychologist. “We talk of generalizing, but is there any such thing? Aren’t we always striving from one concrete to another, and isn’t what we call generalizing merely a process of finding our way?”

“I see what you mean,” said the artist, expressing in that familiar formula the state of the man who hopes to know what the other man means.

“That’s what I say,” Rulledge put in. “You’ve got something up your sleeve. What is it?”

Wanhope struck the little bell on the table before him, but, without waiting for a response, he intercepted a waiter who was passing with a coffee-pot, and asked, “Oh, couldn’t you give me some of that?”

The man filled his cup for him, and after Wanhope put in the sugar and lifted it to his lips, Rulledge said, with his impetuous business air, “It’s easy to see what Wanhope does his high thinking on.”

“Yes,” the psychologist admitted, “coffee is an inspiration. But you can overdo an inspiration. It would be interesting to know whether there hasn’t been a change in the quality of thought since the use of such stimulants came in--whether it hasn’t been subtilized--”

“Was that what you were going to say?” demanded Rulledge, relentlessly. “Come, we’ve got no time to throw away!”

Everybody laughed.

“_You_ haven’t, anyway,” said I.

“Well, none of his own,” Minver admitted for the idler.

“I suppose you mean I have thrown it all away. Well, I don’t want to throw away other peoples’. Go on, Wanhope.”

II.

The psychologist set his cup down and resumed his cigar, which he had to pull at pretty strongly before it revived. “I should not be surprised,” he began, “if a good deal of the fear of death had arisen, and perpetuated itself in the race, from the early personification of dissolution as an enemy of a certain dreadful aspect, armed and threatening. That conception wouldn’t have been found in men’s minds at first; it would have been the result of later crude meditation upon the fact. But it would have remained through all the imaginative ages, and the notion might have been intensified in the more delicate temperaments as time went on, and by the play of heredity it might come down to our own day in certain instances with a force scarcely impaired by the lapse of incalculable time.”

“You said just now,” said Rulledge, in rueful reproach, “that personification had gone out.”

“Yes, it has. I did say that, and yet I suppose that though such a notion of death, say, no longer survives in the consciousness, it does survive in the unconsciousness, and that any vivid accident or illusory suggestion would have force to bring it to the surface.”

“I wish I knew what you were driving at,” said Rulledge.

“You remember Ormond, don’t you?” asked Wanhope, turning suddenly to me.

“Perfectly,” I said. “I--he isn’t living, is he?”

“No; he died two years ago.”

“I thought so,” I said, with the relief that one feels in not having put a fellow-creature out of life, even conditionally.

“You knew Mrs. Ormond, too, I believe,” the psychologist pursued.

I owned that I used to go to the Ormonds’ house.

“Then you know what a type she was, I suppose,” he turned to the others, “and as they’re both dead it’s no contravention of the club etiquette against talking of women, to speak of her. I can’t very well give the instance--the sign--that Rulledge is seeking without speaking of her, unless I use a great deal of circumlocution.” We all urged him to go on, and he went on. “I had the facts I’m going to give, from Mrs. Ormond. You know that the Ormonds left New York a couple of years ago?”

He happened to look at Minver as he spoke, and Minver answered: “No; I must confess that I didn’t even know they had left the planet.”

Wanhope ignored his irrelevant ignorance. “They went to live provisionally at a place up the Housatonic road, somewhere--perhaps Canaan; but it doesn’t matter. Ormond had been suffering some time with an obscure affection of the heart--”

“Oh, come now!” said Rulledge. “You’re not going to spring anything so pat as heart-disease on us?”

“Acton is all ears,” said Minver, nodding toward me. “He hears the weird note afar.”

The psychologist smiled. “I’m afraid you’re not interested. I’m not much interested myself in these unrelated instances.”

“Oh, no!” “Don’t!” “Do go on!” the different entreaties came, and after a little time taken to recover his lost equanimity, Wanhope went on: “I don’t know whether you knew that Ormond had rather a peculiar dread of death.” We none of us could affirm that we did, and again Wanhope resumed: “I shouldn’t say that he was a coward above other men I believe he was rather below the average in cowardice. But the thought of death weighed upon him. You find this much more commonly among the Russians, if we are to believe their novelists, than among Americans. He might have been a character out of one of Tourguénief’s books, the idea of death was so constantly present with him. He once told me that the fear of it was a part of his earliest consciousness, before the time when he could have had any intellectual conception of it. It seemed to be something like the projection of an alien horror into his life--a prenatal influence--”

“Jove!” Rulledge broke in. “I don’t see how the women stand it. To look forward nearly a whole year to death as the possible end of all they’re hoping for and suffering for! Talk of men’s courage after that! I wonder we’re not _all_ marked.’

“I never heard of anything of the kind in Ormond’s history,” said Wanhope, tolerant of the incursion.

Minver took his cigar out to ask, the more impressively, perhaps, “What do you fellows make of the terror that a two months’ babe starts in its sleep with before it can have any notion of what fear is on its own hook?”

“We don’t make anything of it,” the psychologist answered. “Perhaps the pathologists do.”

“Oh, it’s easy enough to say wind,” Rulledge indignantly protested.