Part 6

I did not go to bed at once. How should I have done that? I was still listening for that scream, that pistol-shot. Nothing came. I remember that, after an hour, I found it all receding from me--the Upchers’ crossed emotions and perverted fates. It was like stepping out of a miasmic mist. Filippo Upcher was dead; and on the other side of the grave there had been no such encounter for him as I had imagined. And I had positively seen a demoniac Rachel Upcher waiting for him on that pale verge! I searched the room for books. There was some Ibsen, which at that moment I did not want. I rejected, one after one, nearly all the volumes that the shelves held. It was a stupid collection. I had about made up my mind to the “Idylls of the King” (they were different enough, in all conscience, from the Upcher case) when I saw a pile of magazines on a table in a distant corner. “Something sentimental,” I proposed to myself, as I went over to ravage them. Underneath the magazines--a scattered lot, for the most part, of _London Graphics_ and _English Illustrateds_--I found a serried pack of newspapers: San Francisco and Denver sheets, running a few months back. I had never seen a Denver newspaper, and I picked one up to read the editorials, out of a desultory curiosity rare with me. On the first page, black head-lines took a familiar contour. I had stumbled on the charwoman’s evidence against Filippo Upcher. _Rien que ça!_

My first feeling, I remember, was one of impotent anger--the child’s raving at the rain--that I must spend the night in that house. It was preposterous that life should ask it of me. Talk of white nights! What, pray, would be the color of mine? Then I, in my turn, “pulled myself together.” I went back to the newspapers and examined them all. The little file was arranged in chronological order and was coextensive with the Upcher case, from arrest to announcement of the execution. The _Orb_ might have been a little fuller, but not much. The West had not been fickle to Filippo.

I sat staring at the neatly folded papers for a time. They seemed to me monstrous, not fit to touch, as if they were by no means innocent of Filippo Upcher’s fate. By a trick of nerves and weak lamplight, there seemed to be nothing else in the room. I was alone in the world with them. How long I sat there, fixing them with eyes that must have shown clear loathing, I have never known. There are moments like that, which contrive cunningly to exist outside of Time and Space, of which you remember only the quality. But I know that when I heard steps in the corridor, I was sure for an instant that it was Filippo Upcher returning. I was too overwrought to reflect that, whatever the perils of Rachel Upcher’s house might be, the intrusion of the dead Filippo was not one of them: that he would profit resolutely by the last league of those fortunate distances--if so it chanced, by the immunity of very Hell. It could not be Filippo’s hand that knocked so nervously on the door. Nor was it. I opened to Rachel Upcher. The first glance at her face, her eyes, her aimless, feverish, clutching hands, showed that the spell had at last been broken. She had taken off her black dress and was wrapped in loose, floating, waving pink. Have you ever imagined the Erinyes in pink? No other conceivable vision suggests the figure that stood before me. I remember wondering foolishly and irrelevantly why, if she could look like that, she had not done Ibsen better. But she brought me back to fact as she beckoned me out of the room.

“I am sorry--very sorry--but--I was busy with your sister when you came in, and they have given you the wrong room. I will send some one to move your things--I will show you your room. Please come--I am sorry.”

I cannot describe her voice. The words came out with difficult, unnatural haste, like blood from a wound. Between them she clutched at this or that shred of lace. But I could deal better even with frenzy than with the mask that earlier I had so little contrived to disturb. I felt relieved, disburdened. And Filippo was safe--safe. I was free to deal as I would.

I stepped back into the room. The pile of papers no longer controlled my nerves. After all, they had been but the distant reek of the monster. I went over and lifted them, then faced her.

“Is this what you mean by the wrong room?”

She must have seen at once that I had examined them; that I had sounded the whole significance of their presence there. The one on top--I had not disturbed their order--gave in clear print the date fixed for Filippo Upcher’s execution: that date now a fortnight back. And she had played to me, as if I were a gallery god, with her black dress!

“I have looked them through,” I went on; “and though I didn’t need to read those columns, I know just what they contain. You knew it all.” I paused. It would have taken, it seemed to me, the vocabulary of a major prophet to denounce her fitly. I could only leave it at that bald hint of her baseness.

She made no attempt at denial or defence. Something happened in her face--something more like dissolution than like change--as if the elements of her old mask would never reassemble. She stepped forward, still gathering the floating ribands, the loose laces, in her nervous hands. Once she turned as if listening for a sound. Then she sat down beside my fire, her head bent forward toward me; ready, it seemed, to speak. Her fingers moved constantly, pulling, knotting, smoothing the trailing streamers of her gown. The rest of her body was as still as Filippo Upcher’s own. I endured her eyes for a moment. Then I repeated my accusation. “You knew it all.”

“Yes, I knew it all.”

I had not dreamed, in spite of the papers that I clutched in full view of her, that she would confess so simply. But they apparently brought speech to her lips. She did not go on at once, and when she did, she sounded curiously as Filippo Upcher in prison had sounded. Her voice touched him only with disgust. Yet she stinted no detail, and I had to hear of Filippo’s vices: his vanities, his indiscretions, his infidelities, all the seven deadly sins against her pride committed by him daily. He may have been only a bounder, but his punishment had been fit for one heroic in sin. I did my best to keep that discrepancy in mind as she went on vulgarizing him. I am no cross-questioner, and I let her account move, without interruption, to the strange, fluttering _tempo_ of her hands. Occasionally her voice found a vibrant note, but for the most part it was flat, impersonal as a phonograph: the voice of the actress who is not at home in the unstudied rôle. I do not think she gauged her effect; I am sure that she was given wholly to the task of describing her hideous attitude veraciously. There was no hint of appeal in her tone, as to some dim tribunal which I might represent; but she seemed, once started, to like to tell her story. It was not really a story--the patched portrait of a hatred, rather. Once or twice I opened my lips to cry out: “Why not, in Heaven’s name, a divorce rather than this?” I always shut them without asking, and before the end I understood. The two had simply hated each other too much. They could never be adequately divorced while both beheld the sun. To walk the same earth was too oppressive, too intimate a tie. It sounds incredible--even to me, now; but I believed it without difficulty at that moment. I remembered the firmness with which Filippo had declared that, herself poison, she had poisoned him. Well, there _were_ fangs beneath her tongue.

Heaven knows--it’s the one thing I don’t know about it, to this day--if there was any deliberate attempt on Rachel Upcher’s part to give her flight a suspicious look. There were so many ways, when once you knew for a fact that Filippo had not killed her, in which you could account for the details that earlier had seemed to point to foul play. My own notion is that she fled blindly, with no light in her eyes--no ghastly glimmer of catastrophe to come. She had covered her tracks completely because she had wished to be completely lost. She didn’t wish Filippo to have even the satisfaction of knowing whether she was alive or dead. Some of her dust-throwing--the unused ticket, for example--resulted in damning evidence against Filippo. After that, coincidence labored faithfully at his undoing. No one knows, even now, whose body it was that passed for Rachel Upcher’s. All other clues were abandoned at the time for the convincing one that led to her. I have sometimes wondered why I didn’t ask her more questions: to whom she had originally given the marked underclothing, for example. It might have gone far toward identifying what the Country Club grounds had so unluckily given up. But to lead those tortured fragments of bone and flesh into another masquerade would have been too grotesque. And at that moment, in the wavering, unholy lamplight of the half-bare, half-tawdry room--the whole not unlike one of Goya’s foregrounds--justice and the public were to me equally unreal. What I realized absolutely was that so long as Rachel Upcher lived, I might not speak. Horror that she was, she had somehow contrived to be the person who must be saved. I would have dragged her by the hair to the prison gates, had there been any chance of saving Filippo--at least, I hope I should. But Filippo seemed to me at the moment so entirely lucky that to avenge him didn’t matter. I think I felt, sitting opposite that Fury in pink, something of their own emotion. Filippo was happier, _tout bonnement_, in another world from her; and to do anything to bring them together--to hound her into suicide, for example--would be to play him a low trick. I could have drunk to her long life as she sat there before me. It matters little to most of us what the just ghosts think; how much less must our opinion matter to them! No; Rachel Upcher, even as I counted her spots and circles, was safe from me. I didn’t want to know anything definitely incriminating about her flight, anything that would bring her within the law, or impose on me a citizen’s duties. Citizens had already bungled the situation enough. If she had prepared the trap for Filippo, might that fact be forever unknown! But I really do not believe that she had. What she had done was to profit shamelessly (a weak word!) by coincidence. I have often wondered if Rachel Upcher never wavered, never shuddered, during those months of her wicked silence. That question I even put to her then, after a fashion. “It was long,” she answered; “but I should do it all again. He was horrible.” What can you do with hatred like that? He had been to her, as she to him, actual infection. “Poison ... and I am poisoned.” Filippo’s words to me would have served his wife’s turn perfectly. There was, in the conventional sense, for all her specific complaints, no “cause.” She hated him, not for what he did but for what he was. She _would_ have done it all again. The mere irony of her action would have been too much for some women; but Rachel Upcher had no ironic sense--only a natural and Ibsen-enhanced power of living and breathing among unspeakable emotions. And she plucked at those ribands, those laces, with the delicate, hovering fingers of a ghoul.

It is all so long ago that I could not, if I would, give you the exact words in which, at length, she made all this clear. Neither my mind nor my pen took any stenographic report of that conversation. I have given such phrases as I remember. The impression is there for life, however. Besides, there is no man who could not build up for himself any amount of literature out of that one naked fact: that Rachel Upcher knew her husband’s plight, and that she lay, mute, breathless, concealed, in her lair, lest she should, by word or gesture, save him. She took the whole trial, from accusation to sentence, for a piece of sublime, unmitigated luck--a beautiful blunder of Heaven’s in her behalf. That she thought of herself as guilty, I do not believe; only as--at last!--extremely fortunate. At least, as her tale went on, I heard less and less any accent of hesitation. She knew--oh, perfectly--how little any one else would agree with her. She was willing to beg my silence in any attitude of humility I chose to demand. But Rachel Upcher would never accuse herself. I asked no posturing of her. She got my promise easily enough. Can you imagine my going hotfoot to wake Letitia with the story? No more than that could I go to wake New York with it. Rachel Upcher, calmed by my solemn promise (though, if you’ll believe it, her own recital had already greatly calmed her), left me to seek repose. I watched her fluttering, sinister figure down the corridor, then came back to my infected room. She had not touched the pile of newspapers. I spent the night reading Ibsen; and in the morning managed so that we got off early. Mrs. Wace did not come down to breakfast, and I did not see her again. Young Floyd was in the devil of a temper, but his temper served admirably to facilitate our departure. He abandoned ranch affairs entirely to get us safely on our way. Our sick horse was in perfectly good condition, and would have given us no possible excuse for lingering. Letitia, out of sight of the ranch, delivered herself of a hesitating comment.

“Do you know, Richard, I have an idea that Mrs. Wace is not really a nice woman?”

I, too, had broken Mrs. Wace’s bread, but I did not hesitate. “I think you are undoubtedly right, Letitia.”

It was the only thing I have ever, until now, been able to do to avenge Filippo Upcher. Even when I learned (I always had an arrangement by which I should learn, if it occurred) of Mrs. Floyd’s death, I could still do nothing. There was poor Evie, who never knew, and who, as I say, could not have borne it.

I shall be much blamed by many people, no doubt, for having promised Rachel Upcher what she asked. I can only say that any one else, in my place, would have done the same. They were best kept apart: I don’t know how else to put it. I shall be blamed, too, for not seizing my late, my twelfth-hour opportunity to eulogize Filippo Upcher--for not, at least, trying to explain him. There would be no point in trying to account for what happened by characterizing Filippo. Nothing could account for such hatred: it was simply a great natural fact. They combined, like chemical agents, to that monstrous result. Each was, to the other, poison. I tell the truth now because no one has ever doubted Upcher’s guilt, and it is only common fairness that he should be cleared. Why should I, for that reason, weave flatteries about him? He did not murder his wife; but that fact has not made it any easier to call him “Filippo,” which I have faithfully done since I encountered Rachel Upcher in southern California. If truth is the order of the day, let me say the other thing that for years I have not been at liberty to say: he was a frightful bounder.

ON THE STAIRCASE

Probably the least wise way to begin a ghoststory is to say that one does not believe in ghosts. It suggests that one has never seen the real article. Perhaps, in one sense, I never have; yet I am tempted to set down a few facts that I have never turned over to the Society for Psychical Research or discussed at my club. The fact is that I had ingeniously forgotten them until I saw Harry Medway, the specialist--my old classmate--a few years ago. I say “forgotten”; of course, I had not forgotten them, but, in order to carry on the business of life, I had managed to record them, as it were, in sympathetic ink. After I heard what Harry Medway had to say, I took out the loose sheets and turned them to the fire. Then the writing came out strong and clear again--letter by letter, line by line, as fatefully as Belshazzar’s “immortal postscript.” Did I say that I do not believe in ghosts? Well--I am getting toward the end, and a few inconsistencies may be forgiven to one who is not far from discoveries that will certainly be inconsistent with much that we have learned by heart in this interesting world. Perhaps it will be pardoned me as a last flicker of moribund pride if I say that in my younger days I was a crack shot, and to the best of my belief never refused a bet or a drink or an adventure. I do not remember ever having been afraid of a human being; and yet I have known fear. There are weeks, still, when I live in a bath of it. I think I will amend my first statement, and say instead that I do not believe in any ghosts except my own--oh, and in Wender’s and Lithway’s, of course.

Some people still remember Lithway for the sake of his charm. He never achieved anything, so far as I know, except his own delightful personality. He was a classmate of mine, and we saw a great deal of each other both in and after college--until he married, indeed. His marriage coincided with my own appointment to a small diplomatic post in the East; and by the time that I had served my apprenticeship, come into my property, resigned from the service, and returned to America, Lithway’s wife had suddenly and tragically died. I had never seen her but once--on her wedding-day--but I had reason to believe that Lithway had every right to be as inconsolable as he was. If he had ever had any ambition in his own profession, which was law, he lost it all when he lost her. He retired to the suburban country, where he bought a new house that had just been put up. He was its first tenant, I remember. That fact, later, grew to seem important. There he relapsed into a semi-populated solitude, with a few visitors, a great many books, and an inordinate amount of tobacco. These details I gathered from Wender in town, while I was adjusting my affairs.

Never had an inheritance come so pat as mine. There were all sorts of places I wanted to go to, and now I had money enough to do it. The _wanderlust_ had nearly eaten my heart out during the years when I had kicked my heels in that third-rate legation. I wanted to see Lithway, but a dozen minor catastrophes prevented us from meeting during those breathless weeks, and as soon as I could I positively had to be off. Youth is like that. So that, although Lithway’s bereavement had been very recent, at the time when I was in America settling my affairs and drawing the first instalment of my beautiful income--there is no beauty like that of unearned increment--I did not see him until he had been a widower for more than two years.

The first times I visited Lithway were near together. I had begun what was to be my almost life-long holiday by spending two months alone--save for servants--on a house-boat in the Vale of Cashmere; and my next flights were very short. When I came back from those, I rested on level wing at Braythe. Lithway was a little bothered, on one of these occasions, about the will of a cousin who had died in Germany, leaving an orphan daughter, a child of six or seven. His conscience troubled him sometimes, and occasionally he said he ought to go over and see that the child’s inheritance was properly administered. But there was an aunt--a mother’s sister--to look after the child, and her letters indicated that there was plenty of money and a good lawyer to look after the investments. Since his wife’s death, Lithway had sunk into lethargy. He had enough to live on, and he drew out of business entirely, putting everything he had into government bonds. When he hadn’t energy enough left to cut off coupons, he said, he should know that it was time for him to commit suicide. He really spoke as if he thought that final indolence might arrive any day. I read the aunt’s letters. She seemed to be a good sort, and the pages reeked of luxury and the maternal instinct. I rather thought it would be a good excuse to get Lithway out of his rut, and advised him to go; but, when he seemed so unwilling, I couldn’t conscientiously say I thought the duty imperative. I had long ago exhausted Germany--I had no instinct to accompany him.

Lithway, then, was perfectly idle. His complete lack of the executive gift made him an incomparable host. He had been in the house three years, and I was visiting him there for perhaps the third time, when he told me that it was haunted. He didn’t seem inclined to give details, and, above all, didn’t seem inclined to be worried. He sat up very late always, and preferably alone, a fact that in itself proved that he was not nervous. As I said, I had never been interested in ghosts, and the newness of the house robbed fear of all seriousness. Ghosts batten on legend and decay. There wasn’t any legend, and the house was almost shockingly clean. When he told me of the ghost, then, I forbore to ask for any more information than he, of his own volition, gave me. If he had wanted advice or assistance, he would, of course, have said so. The servants seemed utterly unaware of anything queer, and servants leave a haunted house as rats a sinking ship. It really did not seem worth inquiring into. I referred occasionally to Lithway’s ghost as I might have done to a Syracusan coin which I should know him proud to possess but loath to show.

On my return from Yucatan, one early spring, Lithway welcomed me as usual. He seemed lazier than ever, and I noticed that he had moved his books down from a second-story to a ground-floor room. He slept outdoors summer and winter, and he had an outside stairway built to lead from his library up to the sleeping-porch. A door from the sleeping-porch led straight into his dressing-room. I laughed at his arrangements a little.

“You live on this side of the house entirely now--cut off, actually, from the other side. What is the matter with the east?”

He pointed out to me that the dining-room and the billiard-room were on the eastern side and that he never shunned them. “It’s just a notion,” he said. “Mrs. Jayne” (the housekeeper) “sleeps on the second floor, and I don’t like to wake her when I go up at three in the morning. She is a light sleeper.”

I laughed outright. “Lithway, you’re getting to be an old maid.”

It was natural that I should dispose my effects in the rooms least likely to be used by Lithway. I took over his discarded up-stairs study, and, with a bedroom next door, was very comfortable. He assured me that he had no reason to suppose I should ever be disturbed in either room. Moving his own things, he said, had been purely a precautionary measure in behalf of Mrs. Jayne. Curiously enough, I was perfectly sure that his first statement was absolutely true and his second absolutely false. Only the first one, however, seemed to be really my affair. I could hardly complain.

Lithway did seem changed; but I have such an involuntary trick of comparing my rediscovered friends with the human beings I have most recently been seeing that I did not take the change too seriously. He was perfectly unlike the Yucatan Indians; but, on reflection, why shouldn’t he be, I asked myself. Probably he had always been just like that. I couldn’t prove that he hadn’t. Yet I did think there was something back of his listlessness other than mere prolonged grief for his wife. Occasionally, I confess, I thought about the ghost in this connection.