Part 7

One morning I was leaving my sitting-room to go down to Lithway’s library. The door of the room faced the staircase to the third story, and as I came out I could always see, directly opposite and above me, a line of white banisters that ran along the narrow third-story hall. Mechanically, this time, I looked up and saw--I need not say, to my surprise--a burly negro leaning over the rail looking down at me. The servants were all white, and the man had, besides, a very definite look of not belonging there. He didn’t, in any way, fit into his background. I ran up the stairs to investigate. When I got just beneath him, he bent over towards me with a malicious gesture. All I saw, for an instant, was a naked brown arm holding up a curious jagged knife. The edge caught the little light there was in the dim hall as he struck at me. I hit back, but he had gone before I reached him--simply ceased to be. There was no Cheshire-cat vanishing process. I was staring again into the dim hall, over the white banisters. There were no rooms on that side of the hall, and consequently no doors.

A light broke in on me. I went down-stairs to Lithway. “I’ve seen your ghost,” I said bluntly.

What seemed to be a great relief relaxed his features. “You have! And isn’t she extraordinary?”

“She?”

“You say you’ve seen her,” he went on hurriedly.

“Her? _Him_, man--black as Tartarus. And he cut me over the head.”

“There?” Lithway drew his finger down the place.

“Yes. How did you know? I don’t feel it now.”

“Look at yourself.”

He handed me a mirror. The slash was indicated clearly by a white line, but there was no abrasion.

“That is very interesting,” I managed to say; but I really did not half like it.

Lithway looked at me incredulously. “She has never had a weapon before,” he murmured.

“She? This was a man.”

“Oh, no!” he contradicted. “That’s impossible.”

“He was a hairy brute and full-bearded besides,” I calmly insisted.

Lithway jumped up. “My God! there’s some one in the house.” He caught up a revolver. “Let us go and look. He’ll have made off with the silver.”

“Look here, Lithway,” I protested. “I tell you this man wasn’t real. He vanished into thin air--like any other ghost.”

“But the ghost is a woman.” He was as stupid as a child about it.

“Then there are two.” I didn’t really believe it, but it seemed clear that we could never settle the dispute. Each at least would have to pretend to believe the other for the sake of peace.

“Suppose you tell me about your ghost,” I suggested soothingly. But Lithway was dogged, and we had to spend an hour exploring the house and counting up Lithway’s valuables. Needless to say, there was no sign of invasion anywhere. At the end of the hour I repeated my demand. The scar was beginning to fade, I noted in the mirror, though still clearly visible.

“Suppose you tell me about _your_ ghost. You never have, you know.”

“I’ve only seen her a few times.”

“Where?”

“Leaning over the banisters in the third-floor hall.”

“What is she like?”

“A slip of a girl. Rather fair and drooping, but a strange look in her eyes. Dressed in white, with a blue sash. That’s all.”

“Does she speak?”

“No; but she waves a folded paper at me.”

“What time of day have you seen her?”

“About eleven in the morning.”

The clocks were then striking twelve.

“Well,” I ventured, “that’s clearly the ghost’s hour. But the two of them couldn’t be more different.”

He made me describe the savage again. The extraordinary part of it was that, in spite of his baffling blackness, I could do so perfectly. He was as individual to me as a white man--more than that, as a friend. He had personality, that ghost.

“What race should you say he was?”

I thought. “Some race I don’t know; Zulu, perhaps. A well-built beggar.”

“And you’re perfectly sure he was real--I mean, wasn’t human?”

The distinction made me smile, though the question irritated me. “You can see that if his object was murder he made a poor job. You found all your silver, didn’t you?” Then I played my trump-card. “And do you suppose that a burglar would wander round this countryside in a nose-ring and a loincloth? Nice disguise!”

Lithway looked disturbed. “But the other one,” he murmured. “I don’t understand the other.”

“She seems much easier to understand than mine,” I protested.

“Oh, I don’t mean _her_!” he said. “I mean _it_.”

For the first time I began to be afraid that Lithway had left the straight track of common sense. It was silly enough to have two ghosts in a new house--but three!

“It?” I asked.

“The one Wender saw.”

“Oh! Wender has seen one?”

“Six months ago. I’ve never been able to get him here since. It _was_ rather nasty, and Wender--well, Wender’s sensitive. And he’s a little dotty on the occult, in any case.”

“Did he see it at eleven in the morning?”

Lithway seemed irritated. “Of course!” he snapped out. He spoke as if the idiosyncrasy of his damned house had a dignity that he was bound to defend.

“And what was it?”

“A big rattlesnake, coiled to strike.”

Even then I could not take it seriously. “That’s not a ghost; it’s a symptom.”

“It _did_ strike,” Lithway went on.

“Did he have a scar?”

“No. He couldn’t even swear that it quite touched him.”

“Then why did it worry him?”

Lithway hesitated. “I suppose the uncertainty----”

“Uncertainty! If there’s anything less dreadful than an imaginary snake that has struck, it is an imaginary snake that hasn’t struck. What has got into Wender?”

“Fear, apparently,” said Lithway shortly. “He won’t come back. Says a real rattlesnake probably wouldn’t get into a house in Braythe more than once, but an unreal rattlesnake might get in any day. I don’t blame him.”

“May I ask,” I said blandly, “if you are so far gone that you think rattlesnakes have ghosts?”

Lithway lost his temper. “If you want to jeer at the thing, for God’s sake have the manners not to do it in this house! I tell you we have all three seen ghosts.”

“The ghost of a rattlesnake,” I murmured to myself. “It beats everything!” And I looked once more into the mirror. The scar that the knife had made was still perceptible, but very faint. “Did you hunt the house over for the snake?”

“Of course we did.”

“Did you find it?”

“Of course we didn’t--any more than we found your Zulu.”

“Then why did you insist so on hunting the Zulu?”

Lithway colored a little. “Well, to tell the truth, I never wholly believed in that snake. If you or Wender had only seen _her_, now!”

“I don’t see why Wender was so worried,” I said. “After all, a snake might have got in--and got out.”

“He saw it twice,” explained Lithway.

“Symptoms,” I murmured. “Had he ever had an adventure with a rattlesnake?”

“No.”

“Then why should it make him nervous?”

“I suppose”--Lithway looked at me a little cautiously, I thought--“just because he never _had_ seen one. He said, I remember, that that rattlesnake hadn’t been born yet.”

I laughed. “Wender _is_ sensitive. The ghost of a rattlesnake that has never lived--well, you can’t be more fantastic than that!”

“Wender has a theory,” Lithway said.

But he seemed actually to want to change the subject. Accordingly, I did change it--a little. I didn’t really care for Wender’s theories. I had heard some of them. They included elementals.

“Tell me some more about yours. She’s the most convincing of the three. Do you recognize her?”

“Never saw any one that looked remotely like her.”

“And you are the first occupant of this house,” I mused. “Was she dressed in an old-fashioned way?”

Lithway actually blushed. “She is dressed rather oddly--her hair is done queerly. I’ve hunted the fashion-books through, and I can’t find such a fashion anywhere in the last century. I’m not in the least afraid, but I am curious about her, I admit.”

“Was Wender’s rattlesnake old-fashioned?”

Lithway got up. “See here,” he said, “I’m not going to stand jollying. That’s the one thing I _am_ afraid of. Should you like to hear Wender’s theory?”

“Not I,” I said firmly. “He believes in two kinds of magic--white and black--and has eaten the fruit of the mango-tree that a fakir has just induced to grow out of the seed before his eyes. He told me once that devils were square. I’m not in the least interested in Wender’s rattlesnake. The wonder is, with his peculiar twist of mind, that he doesn’t insist on living in this house.”

“He particularly hates snakes,” answered Lithway. “He was hoping to see _her_, but he never could. Nor you, apparently.”

“How often do you see her?”

“About once in six months.”

“And you’re not afraid?”

“Well--she doesn’t _do_ anything to me, you know.” He was very serious.

“Probably couldn’t hurt you if she did--a young thing like that. But why don’t you move out?”

Lithway frankly crimsoned. “I--like her.”

“In spite of her eyes?”

“In spite of her eyes. And--I’ve thought that look in them might be the cross light on the staircase.”

I burst out laughing. “Lithway, come away with me. Solitude is getting on your nerves. We’ll go to Germany and look after your little cousin and the aunt who writes such wonderful letters.”

“No.” Lithway was firm. “It’s too much like work.”

I was serious, for he really seemed to me, at the time of this visit, in rather a bad way. I urged him with every argument I could think of. He had no counter-arguments, but finally he broke out: “Well, if you will have it, I feel safer here.”

“You’ve never seen her anywhere else, have you?”

“No.”

“Then this seems to be the one point of danger.”

“Wender’s theory is that--” he began.

But I persisted in not hearing Wender’s theory. Even when, a week later, my own experience was exactly duplicated and I had spent another day in watching a white line fade off my forehead, I still persisted. But, as Lithway wouldn’t leave the house, I did. I began even to have a sneaking sympathy for Wender. But I didn’t want to hear his theory. Indeed, to this day I never have heard it. Oddly enough, though, I should be willing to wager a good sum that it was accurate.

I was arranging for a considerable flight--something faddier and more dangerous than I had hitherto attempted--and to a friend as indolent as Lithway I could only prepare to bid a long farewell. He positively refused to accompany me even on the earlier and less difficult stages of my journey. “I’ll stick to my home,” he declared. It was a queer home to want to stick to, I thought privately, especially as the ghost was obviously local. He had never seen an apparition except at Braythe--nor had I, nor had Wender. I worried about leaving him there, for the one danger I apprehended was the danger of overwrought nerves; but Lithway refused to budge, and you can’t coerce a sane and able-bodied man with a private fortune. I did carry my own precautions to the point of looking up the history of the house. The man from whom Lithway had bought it, while it was still unfinished, had intended it for his own occupancy; but a lucrative post in a foreign country had determined him to leave America. The very architect was a churchwarden, the husband of one wife and the father of eight children. I even hunted up the contractor: not one accident had occurred while the house was building, and he had employed throughout, most amicably, union labor on its own terms. It was silly of me, if you like, but I had really been shaken by the unpleasant powers of the place. After my researches it seemed clear that in objecting to it any further I shouldn’t have a leg to stand on. In any case, Lithway would probably rather live in a charnel-house than move. I had to wash my hands of it all.

The last weeks of my visit were perfectly uneventful, both for Lithway and me--as if the house, too, were on its guard. I came to believe that there was nothing in it, and if either of us had been given to drinking, I should have called the eleven-o’clock visitation a new form of hang-over. I was a little inclined, in defiance of medical authorities, to consider it an original and interesting form of indigestion. By degrees I imposed upon myself to that extent. I did not impose on myself, however, to the extent of wanting to hear Wender talk about it; and I still blush to think how shallow were the excuses that I mustered for not meeting him at any of the times that he proposed.

This is a bad narrative, for the reason that it must be so fragmentary. It is riddled with lapses of time. Ghosts may get in their fine work in an hour, but they have always been preparing their _coup_ for years. Every ghost, compared with us, is Methuselah. We have to fight in a vulnerable and dissolving body; but they aren’t pressed for time. They’ve only to lie low until the psychologic moment. Oh, I’d undertake to accomplish almost anything if you’d give me the ghost’s chance. If he can’t get what he wants out of this generation, he can get it out of the next. Grand thing, to be a ghost!

It was some years before I went back to Braythe. Wender, I happen to know, never went back. Lithway used to write me now and then, but seldom referred to my adventure. He couldn’t very well, since the chief burden of his letters was always “When are you coming to visit me?” Once, when I had pressed him to join me for a season in Japan, he virtually consented, but at the last moment I got a telegram, saying: “I can’t leave her. _Bon voyage!_” That didn’t make me want to go back to Braythe. I was worried about him, but his persistent refusal to act on any one’s advice made it impossible to do anything for him. I thought once of hiring some one to burn the house down; but Lithway wouldn’t leave it, and I didn’t want to do anything clumsy that would imperil him. I was much too far away to arrange it neatly. I suggested it once to Wender, when we happened to meet in London, and he was exceedingly taken with the idea. I half hoped, for a moment, that he would do it himself. But the next afternoon he came back with a lot of reasons why it wouldn’t do--he had been grubbing in the British Museum all day. I very nearly heard Wender’s theory that time, but I pleaded a dinner engagement and got off.

You can imagine that I was delighted when I heard from Lithway, some years after my own encounter with the savage on the staircase, that he had decided to pull out and go to Europe. He had the most fantastic reasons for doing it--this time he wrote me fully. It seems he had become convinced that his apparition was displeased with him--didn’t like the look in her eyes, found it critical. As he wasn’t doing anything in particular except live like a hermit at Braythe, the only thing he could think of to propitiate her was to leave. Perhaps there was a sort of withered coquetry in it, too; he may have thought the lady would miss him if he departed and shut up the house. You see, by this time she was about the most real thing in his life. I don’t defend Lithway; but I thought then that, whatever the impelling motive, it would be an excellent thing for him to leave Braythe for a time. Perhaps, once free of it, he would develop a normal and effectual repugnance to going back, and then we should all have our dear, delightful Lithway again. I wrote triumphantly to Wender, and he replied hopefully, but on a more subdued note.

Lithway came over to Europe. He wrote to me, making tentative suggestions that I should join him; but, as he refused to join me and I didn’t care at all about the sort of thing he was planning, we didn’t meet. I was all for the Peloponnesus, and he was for a wretched tourist’s itinerary that I couldn’t stomach. I hoped to get him in the end to wander about in more interesting places, but as he had announced that he was going first to Berlin to look up the little cousin and her maternal aunt, I thought I would wait until he had satisfied his clannish conscience. Then, one fine day, his old curiosity would waken, and we should perhaps start out together to get new impressions. That fine day never dawned, however. He lingered on in Germany, following his relatives to Marienbad when they left Berlin for the summer. I hoped, with each mail, that he would announce his arrival in some spot where I could conceivably meet him; but the particular letter announcing that never came. He was quite taken up with the cousins. He said nothing about going home, and I was thoroughly glad of that, at least.

I was not wholly glad, just at the moment, when a letter bounced out at me one morning, announcing that he was to marry the little cousin--by this time, as I had understood from earlier correspondence, a lovely girl of eighteen. I had looked forward to much companionship with the Lithway I had known of old, when he should be free of his obsession. I had thought him on the way to freedom; and here he was, caught by a flesh-and-blood damsel who thrust me out quite as decisively as the phantasmal lady on the staircase. I had decency enough to be glad for Lithway, if not for myself; glad that he could strike the old idyllic note and live again delightfully in the moment. I didn’t go to Berlin to see them married, but I sent them my blessing and a very curious and beautiful eighteenth-century clock. I also promised to visit them in America. I felt that, if necessary, I could face Braythe, now that the ghost was so sure to be laid. No woman would stay in a house where her husband was carrying on, however unwillingly, an affair with an apparition; and, as their address remained the same, I believed that the ghost had given up the fight.

This story has almost the gait of history. I have to sum up decades in a phrase. It is really the span of one man’s whole life that I am covering, you see. But have patience with me while I skim the intervening voids, and hover meticulously over the vivid patches of detail.... It was some two years before I reached Braythe. I don’t remember particularly what went on during those two years; I only know that I was a happy wanderer. I was always a happy wanderer, it seems to me as I look back on life, except for the times when I sank by Lithway’s side into his lethargy--a lucid lethargy, in which unaccountable things happened very quietly, with an utter stillness of context. I do know that I was planning a hunting-trip in British Central Africa, and wrote Lithway that I had better postpone my visit until that was over. He seemed so hurt to think that I could prefer any place to him that I did put it off until the next year and made a point of going to the Lithways.

I had no forebodings when I got out of Lithway’s car at his gate and faced the second Mrs. Lithway, who had framed her beauty in the clustering wistaria of the porch. I was immensely glad for Lithway that he had a creature like that to companion him. Youth and beauty are wonderful things to keep by one’s fireside. There was more than a touch of vicarious gratitude in my open admiration of Mrs. Lithway. He was a person one couldn’t help wanting good things for; and one felt it a delicate personal attention to oneself when they came to him.

Nothing changes a man, however, after he has once achieved his type: that was what I felt most keenly, at the end of the evening, as I sat with Lithway in his library. Mrs. Lithway had trailed her light skirts up the staircase with incomparable grace, smiling back at us over her shoulder; and I had gone with Lithway to the library, wondering how long I could hold him with talk of anything but her. I soon saw that he didn’t wish to talk of her. That, after all, was comprehensible--you could take it in so many ways; but it was with real surprise that I saw him sink almost immediately into gloom. Gloom had never been a gift of Lithway’s; his indolence had always been shot through with mirth. Even his absorption in the ghost had been whimsical--almost as if he had deliberately let himself go, had chosen to be obsessed. I didn’t know what to make of the gloom, the unresilient heaviness with which he met my congratulations and my sallies. They had been perfect together at dinner and through the early evening. Now he fell slack in every muscle and feature, as if the preceding hours had been a diabolic strain. I wondered a little if he could be worried about money. I supposed Lithway had enough--and his bride too, if it came to that--though I didn’t know how much. But one could not be long in the house without noticing luxuries that had nothing to do with its original unpretending comfort. You were met at every turn by some æsthetic refinement as costly as the lace and jewels in which Mrs. Lithway’s own loveliness was wrapped. It was evident from all her talk that her standard of civilization was very high; that she had a natural attachment to shining non-essentials. I was at a loss; I didn’t know what to say to him, he looked so tired. Such silence, even between Lithway and me, was awkward.

Finally he spoke: “Do you remember my ghost?”

“I remember your deafening me with talk of her. I never saw her.”

“No, of course you wouldn’t have seen her.”

“I saw one of my own, you remember.”

“Oh, yes! A black man who struck at you. You never have had a black man strike at you in real life, have you?” He turned to me with a faint flicker of interest.

“Never. We threshed all that out before, you know. I never even saw that particular nigger except at Braythe.”

“You will see him, perhaps, if you are fool enough to go to British Central Africa,” he jerked out.

“Perhaps,” I answered. But I was more interested in Lithway’s adventure. “Do you see your ghost now?” I had been itching to ask, and it seemed to me that he had given me a fair opening.

Lithway passed his hand across his brows. “I don’t know. I’m not quite sure. Sometimes I think so. But I couldn’t swear to it.”

“Has she grown dimmer, then--more hazy? You used to speak of her as if she were a real woman coming to a tryst: flesh and blood, at the least.”

He looked at me a little oddly. “I’m not awfully well. My eyes play me tricks sometimes.... When you got off the train to-night, I could have sworn you had a white scar on your forehead. As soon as we got out here and I had a good look at you, I saw you hadn’t, of course.” Then he went back. “I don’t believe I really do see her now. I think it may be an hallucination when occasionally I think I do. Yes, I’m pretty sure that, when I think I do, it’s pure hallucination. I don’t like it; I wish she’d either go or stay.”

“My dear fellow, you speak as if she had ever, in her palmiest days, been anything but an hallucination. Did you get to the point of believing that the girl you say used to hang over the staircase was real?”

“She was more real than the one that sometimes I see there now. Oh, yes, she was real! What I see now--when I see it at all--is just the ghost of her.”

“The ghost of a ghost!” I ejaculated. “It’s as bad as Wender’s rattlesnake.”

Lithway turned to me suddenly. “Where is Wender?”

“Why, don’t you know? Working on American archæology at some university--I don’t know which. He hadn’t decided on the place, when he last wrote. I was going to get his address from you.”

“He won’t come here, you know. And Margaret’s feelings are a little hurt--he has often been quite near. So there’s a kind of official coolness. She doesn’t know about the ghosts, and therefore I can’t quite explain Wender’s refusals to her. Of course, I know it’s on that account; he’s as superstitious as a woman. But poor Margaret, I suppose, believes he doesn’t approve of my having taken a wife. She’s as sweet as possible about it, but I can see she’s hurt. And yet I’d rather she would be hurt than to know about the house.”

“Why, in Heaven’s name, don’t you sell it and move, Lithway?” I cried.

He colored faintly. “Margaret is very fond of the place. I couldn’t, considering its idiosyncrasy, sell with a good conscience, and if I didn’t sell, it would mean losing a pretty penny--more, certainly, than Margaret and I can afford to. She lost most of her own money, you know, a few years ago.”

“The aunt?”