Part 8

“Oh, dear, no!” He said it rather hastily. “But you were quite right at the time. I ought to have gone out there ten years ago. Women never know how to manage money.”

I looked him in the eyes. “Lithway, anything in the world is better than staying in this house. You’re in a bad way. You admit, yourself, you’re not well. And Mrs. Lithway would rather cut out the motor and live anywhere than have you go to pieces.”

He laughed. “Tell Margaret that I’m going to pieces--if you dare!”

“I’m not afraid of you, even if I should.”

“No; but wouldn’t you be afraid of her?”

I thought of the utter youth of Mrs. Lithway; the little white teeth that showed so childishly when she laughed; her small white hands that had seemed so weighed down with a heavy piece of embroidery; her tiny feet that slipped along the polished floors--a girl that you could pick up and throw out of the window.

“Certainly not. Would you?”

“I should think so!” He smiled. “We’ve been very happy here. I don’t think she would like to move. I shan’t suggest it to her. And mind”--he turned to me rather sharply--“don’t you hint to her that the house is the uncanny thing you and that fool Wender seem to think it is.”

I saw that there was no going ahead on that tack. Beyond a certain point, you can’t interfere with mature human beings. But certainly Lithway looked ill; and if he admitted ill health, there must be something in it. It was extraordinary that Mrs. Lithway saw nothing. I was almost sorry--in spite of the remembered radiance of the vision on the porch--that Lithway had chosen to fall in love with a young fool. I rose.

“Love must be blind, if your wife doesn’t see you’re pulled down.”

“Oh, love--it’s the blindest thing going, thank God!” He was silent for a moment. “There are a great many things I can’t explain,” he said. “But you can be sure that everything’s all right.”

I was quite sure, though I couldn’t wholly have told why, that everything was at least moderately wrong. But I decided to say nothing more that night. I went to bed.

Lithway _was_ ill; only so could I account for his nervousness, which sometimes, in the next days, mounted to irritability. He was never irritable with his wife; when the tenser moods were on, he simply ceased to address her, and turned his attention to me. We motored a good deal; that seemed to agree with him. But one morning he failed to appear at breakfast, and Mrs. Lithway seemed surprised that I had heard nothing during the night. He had had an attack of acuter pain--the doctor had been sent for. There had been telephoning, running to and fro, and talk in the corridors that no one had thought of keying down on my account. I was a little ashamed of not having waked, and more than a little cross at not having been called. She assured me that I could have done nothing, and apologized as prettily as possible for having to leave me to myself during the day. Lithway was suffering less, but, of course, she would be at his bedside. Naturally, I made no objections to her wifely solicitude. I was allowed to see Lithway for a few minutes; but the pain was severe, and I cut my conversation short. The doctor suspected the necessity for an operation, and they sent to New York for a consulting specialist. I determined to wait until they should have reached their gruesome decision, on the off chance that I might, in the event of his being moved, be of service to Mrs. Lithway. In spite of her calm and sweetness, and the perfect working of the household mechanism--no flurry, no fright, no delays or hitches--I thought her, still, a young fool. Any woman, of any age, was a fool if she had not seen Lithway withering under her very eyes.

It was a dreary day during which we waited for the New York physician; one of those days when sunlight seems drearier than mist--a monotonous and hostile glare. I tried reading Lithway’s books, but the mere fact that they were his got on my nerves. I decided to go to my room and throw myself on the resources of my own luggage. There would be something there to read, I knew. I closed the library door quietly and went up-stairs. Outside my own door I stopped and looked--involuntarily, with no conscious curiosity--up to the third-story hall. There, in the dim corridor, leaning over the balustrade in a thin shaft of sunlight that struck up from the big window on the landing, stood Mrs. Lithway, with a folded paper in her hand, looking down at me. I did not wish to raise my voice--Lithway, I thought, might be sleeping--so did not speak to her. I don’t think, in any case, I should have wanted to speak to her. The look in her eyes was distinctly unpleasant--the kind of look people don’t usually face you with. I remember wondering, as our surprised glances met, why the deuce she should hate me like that--how the deuce a nice young thing could hate any one like that. It must be personal to me, I thought--no nice young thing would envisage the world at large with such venom. I turned away; and as I turned, I saw her, out of the tail of my eye, walk, with her peculiar lightness of step, along the upper corridor to the trunk-loft. She had the air of being caught, of not having wished to be seen. I opened my bedroom door immediately, but as I opened it I heard a sound behind me. Margaret Lithway stood on the threshold of her husband’s room, with an empty bottle.

“Would you mind taking the car into the village and getting this filled again?” she asked. Her eyes had dark shadows beneath them; she had evidently not slept, the night before.

I flatter myself that I did not betray to her in any way my perturbation. Indeed, the event had fallen on a mind so ripe for solutions that, in the very instant of my facing her, I realized that what I had just seen above-stairs (and seen by mistake, I can assure you; she had fled from me) was Lithway’s old ghost--no less. I took the bottle, read the label, and assured Mrs. Lithway that I would go at once. Mrs. Lithway was wrapped in a darkish house-gown of some sort. The lady in the upper hall had been in white, with a blue sash.... I was very glad when I saw Mrs. Lithway go into her husband’s room and shut the door. I was having hard work to keep my expression where it belonged. For five minutes I stood in the hall; five minutes of unbroken stillness. Then I went to the garage, ordered out the car, and ran into the village, where I presented the bottle to the apothecary. He filled it immediately. As I re-entered the house, the great hall clock struck; it was half past eleven. I sent the stuff--lime-water, I believe--up to Mrs. Lithway by a servant, went into my room, and locked the door.

I cannot say that I solved the whole enigma of Braythe in the hour before luncheon; but I faced for the first time the seriousness of a situation that had always seemed to me, save for Lithway’s curious reactions upon it, more than half fantastic, if not imaginary. I had seen, actually seen, Lithway’s ghost. I had not been meant to see her; and I was inclined to regret the sudden impulse that had led me to leave Lithway’s library and go to my own room. The identity of the “ghost” with Mrs. Lithway was appalling to me--the more so, that there could have been no mistake about the nature of the personality that had reluctantly presented itself to my vision. I found myself saying: “Could that look in her eyes be the cross light on the stairs?” and then suddenly remembered that I was only echoing the Lithway of years ago. It was incredible that any man should have liked the creature I had seen; and I could account for Lithway’s long and sentimental relation with the apparition only by supposing that he had never seen her, as I had, quite off her guard. But if, according to his hint of the night before, he had come to confound the ghost with the real woman--what sort of marriage was _that_? I asked myself. The ghost was a bad lot, straight through. It brought me into the realm of pure horror. The event explained--oh, I raised my hands to wave away the throng of things it explained! Indeed, until I could talk once more with Lithway, I didn’t want to face them; I didn’t want to see clear. I had a horrid sense of being left alone with the phantoms that infested the house: alone, with a helpless, bedridden friend to protect. Mrs. Lithway didn’t need protection--that was clearer than anything else. Mrs. Lithway was safe.

Before night, the consultation had been held, and it was decided that Lithway should be rushed straight to town for an operation. The pain was not absolutely constant; he had tranquil moments; but the symptoms were alarming enough to make them afraid of even a brief delay. We were to take him up the next morning. To all my offers of help, Mrs. Lithway gave a smiling refusal. She could manage perfectly, she said. I am bound to say that she did manage perfectly, thinking of everything, never losing her head, unfailingly adequate, though the shadows under her eyes seemed to grow darker hour by hour. A nurse had come down from town, but I could hardly see what tasks Mrs. Lithway left to the nurse. I did my best, out of loyalty to the loyal Lithway, to subdue my aversion to his wife. I hoped that my aversion was quite unreasonable and that, safe in Europe, I should feel it so. I ventured to say, after dinner, that I hoped she would try to get some sleep.

“Oh, yes, I shall!” She smiled. “There will be a great deal to do to-morrow; and the day after, when they operate, will be a strain. There’s nothing harder than waiting outside. I know.” Her eyes filled, but she went on very calmly. “I am so grateful to you for being here and for going up with us. I have no people of my own, you know, to call on. You have been the greatest comfort.” She gave me a cool hand, said “good night,” and left me.

I do not know whether or not Mrs. Lithway slept, but I certainly did not, save in fitful dozes. I was troubled about Lithway: I thought him in very bad shape for an operation; and I had, besides, nameless forebodings of every sort. It was a comfort, the next morning, to hear him, through an open door, giving practical suggestions to his wife and the nurse about packing his things. I went in to see him before we started off. The doctor was down-stairs with Mrs. Lithway.

“Sorry to let you in for this, my boy. But you are a great help.”

“Mrs. Lithway is wonderful,” I said. “I congratulate you.”

His sombre eyes held me. “Ah, you will never know how wonderful--never!” He said it with a kind of brooding triumph, which, at the moment, I did not wholly understand. Now, long afterwards, I think I do.

I left him, and crossed the corridor to my own room. A slight rustle made me turn. Mrs. Lithway stood in the upper hall, looking down at me--the same creature, to every detail of dress, even to the folded paper in her hand, that I had seen the previous morning. This time I braced myself to face the ghost, to examine her with a passionate keenness. I hoped to find her a less appalling creature. But, at once, Mrs. Lithway leaned over the rail and spoke to me--a little sharply, I remember.

“Would you please telephone to the garage and say that the doctor thinks we ought to start ten minutes earlier than we had planned? I shall be down directly.”

The hand that held the paper was by this time hidden in the folds of her skirt. She turned and sped lightly along the corridor to the trunk-loft. Save for the voice, it was a precise repetition of what had happened the day before.

“Certainly,” I said; but I did not turn away until she had disappeared into the trunk-loft. I went to the telephone and gave the message; it took only a few seconds. Then I went to my own room, leaving the door open so that I commanded the hall. In a few minutes Mrs. Lithway came down the stairs from the third story. “Did you telephone?” she asked accusingly, as she caught my eye. I bowed. She passed on into Lithway’s room. There was no paper in her hand. I knew that this time there had been no ghost.

Well.... Lithway, as every one knows, died under the ether. His heart suddenly and unaccountably went back on him. He left no will; and, as he had no relations except the cousin whom he had married, everything went to her. I had once, before his second marriage, seen a will of Lithway’s, myself; but I didn’t care to go into court with that information, especially as in that will he had left me his library. I should have liked, for old sake’s sake, to have Lithway’s library. His widow sold it, and it is by now dispersed about the land. She told me, after the funeral, that she should go on at Braythe, that she never wanted to leave it; but, for whatever reason, she did, after a few years, sell the place suddenly and go to Europe. I have never happened to see her since she sold it, and I did not know the people she sold it to. The house was burned many years ago, I believe, and an elaborate golf-course now covers the place where it stood. I have not been to Braythe since poor Lithway was buried.

I took the hunting-trip that Lithway had been so violently and inexplicably opposed to. I think I was rather a fool to do it, for I ought to have realized, after Lithway’s death, the secret of the house, its absolutely unique specialty. But such is the peacock heart of man that I still, for myself, trusted in “common sense”--in my personal immunity, at least, from every supernatural law. Indeed, it was not until I had actually encountered my savage, and got the wound I bear the scar of, that I gave entire credence to Lithway’s tragedy. I put some time into recovering from the effect of that midnight skirmish in the jungle, and during my recovery I had full opportunity to pity Lithway.

It became quite clear to me that the presences at Braythe concerned themselves only with major dooms. If Lithway’s ghost had been his wife, his wife must have been a bad lot. I am as certain as I can be of anything that he was exceedingly unhappy with her. It was a thousand pities that, for so many years, he had misunderstood the vision; that he had permitted himself--for that was what it amounted to--to fall in love with her in advance. She was, quite literally, his “fate.” Of course, by this time, I feel sure that he couldn’t have escaped her. I don’t believe the house went in for kindly warnings; I think it merely, with the utmost insolence, foretold the inevitable and dared you to escape it. If I hadn’t gone out for big game in Africa, I am quite sure that my nigger would have got at me somewhere else--even if he had to be a cannibal out of a circus running amuck down Broadway. That was the trick of the house: the worst thing that was going to happen to you leered at you authentically over that staircase. I have never understood why I saw Lithway’s apparition; but I can bear witness to the fact that she was furious at my having seen her--as furious as Mrs. Lithway was, the next day, if it comes to that. It was a mistake. My step may have sounded like Lithway’s. Who knows? At least it should be clear what Lithway meant when he said that he didn’t always know whether he saw her or not. The two were pin for pin alike. The apparition, of course, had, from the beginning, worn the dress that Mrs. Lithway was to wear on the day that Lithway was taken to the hospital. I have never liked to penetrate further into the Lithways’ intimate history. I am quite sure that the folded paper was the old will, but I have always endeavored, in my own mind, not to implicate Margaret Lithway more than that. Of course, there could never have been any question of implicating her before the public.

I never had a chance, after my own accident, to consult Wender. I stuck to Europe unbrokenly for many years, as he stuck to America. Both Wender and I, I fancy, were chary of writing what might have been written. Some day, I thought, we would meet and have the whole thing out; but that day never came. Suddenly, one autumn, I had news of his death. He was a member of a summer expedition in Utah and northern Arizona--I think I mentioned that he had gone in for American ethnology. There are, as every one knows, rich finds in our western States for any one who will dig long enough; and they were hoping to get aboriginal skulls and mummies. All this his sister referred to when she wrote me the particulars of his death. She dwelt with forgivable bitterness on the fact of Wender’s having been told beforehand that the particular section he was assigned to was free from rattlesnakes. “Perhaps you know,” she wrote, “that my brother had had, since childhood, a morbid horror of reptiles.” I did know it--Lithway had told me. Wender’s death from the bite of a rattlesnake was perhaps the most ironic of the three adventures; for Wender was the one of us who put most faith in the scenes produced on the stage of Braythe. I never heard Wender’s theory; but I fancy he realized, as Lithway and I did not, that since the “ghosts” we saw were not of the past they must be of the future--a most logical step, which I am surprised none of us should have taken until after the event.

Wender’s catastrophe killed in me much of my love of wandering. At least, it drove me to Harry Medway; and Harry Medway did the rest. I am not afraid of another warrior’s cutting at me with his assegai; but I do not like to be too far from specialists. I have already been warned that I may sometime go blind; and I know that other complications may be expected. Pathology and surgery are sealed books to me; but I still hold so far to logic that I fully expect to die some time as an indirect result of that wound. The scar reminds me daily that its last word has not been said.

I am a fairly old man--the older that I no longer wander, and that I cling so weakly to the great capitals which hold the great physicians. The only thing that I was ever good at I can no longer do. Curiosity has died in me, for the most part; one or two such mighty curiosities have been, you see, already so terribly appeased. But I think I would rise from my death-bed, and wipe away with my own hand the mortal sweat from my face, for the chance of learning what it was that drove Mrs. Lithway, in midwinter, from Braythe. If I could once know what she saw on the staircase, I think I should ask no more respite. The scar might fulfil its mission.

THE TORTOISE

“There are only three things worth while--fighting, drinking, and making love.” It was Chalmers who said it to me as we came out of the theatre, and were idling along towards the club. We had been seeing a very handsome--almost elegant--melodrama. Very impressionable chap, Chalmers, I thought, for I was quite sure that he had never done any fighting; he was apparently a total abstainer; and he positively ran--as whole-heartedly as a frightened cow--from a petticoat.

“What about work?” I asked, as we turned into the club. Chalmers is a fiend for work: always shut up in his laboratory, dry-nursing an experiment.

“Work is an anodyne--a blooming anodyne.” He hunched his shoulders, and his brown coat--the coat of a toilsome recluse, if ever there was one; there’s something peculiarly unworldly about brown tweed for a man’s wear--creased into lumpier curves than ever.

“It’s a mighty slow one. If I wanted a quick effect, I think I’d take to cocaine. Must be exciting, slewing round the corners of Montmartre, dropping your francs into a basket that swings down from God knows where, with the blessed stuff all in it waiting to be inhaled. And all over inside of a year.” Thus I to Chalmers, knowing that we were very far from Montmartre. Chalmers, I should say, was magnificently dependable; you were as safe in dropping a lurid suggestion on him as on the shell of an ancient turtle. I rather liked that idea, which struck me just then; in fact, his clothes were much the color of tortoise-shell.

“But I don’t want it over. You see ... I’ve agreed to hang on.” His keen glance at me, more than his words, savored of explanation.

“Oh!” I made the syllable as non-committal as possible. The lips at one moment so fluent in confession will grow stiff with resentment after the hour of confidence is over. For that reason, I dislike to have people tell me things: I always expect that they will some day hate me, merely because they told.

We sat down at a table, and I ordered a high-ball. Chalmers fussed for a moment, and then committed himself to a _pâté_ sandwich with apollinaris. I didn’t think of asking him to join me. We had been trying for five years to get Chalmers to take a drink. For a year, there were always bets going on it; but it had been a long time now since any of us had made or lost anything on the chance of Chalmers’s potations.

At the same time, my curiosity was aroused. There had never been any mystery about Chalmers. There isn’t any about a tortoise, if it comes to that. The beast has been made much of mythologically, I believe; but even in India they only accuse him of holding up the world. No one pretends, so far as I know, that he keeps anything under his shell except himself. But Chalmers didn’t seem to be even bearing a burden. He was simply Chalmers. He had come among us, an accredited student of physics, with letters of introduction from German professors and Colonial Dames; he had performed the absolutely necessary conventional duties; he was vaguely related to people that every one knew; he was so obviously a gentleman that no one would ever have thought of affirming it. His holidays were all accounted for--in fact, he usually spent them with one or another of our own group. There wasn’t--there isn’t now--a single thing about Chalmers that any one could have the instinct to investigate. It had never occurred to any of us that we didn’t know as much about Chalmers as we did about the people we had been brought up with. We happened not to have been brought up with him, because he had happened to be brought up abroad. His father had been a consul somewhere.

On this occasion, anyhow, my curiosity got the better of my fixed rule. I decided to lead Chalmers on.

“Do you mean to say that your noble industry is nothing but a poor substitute for a drug?”

He smiled quaintly. His green eyes shone under his dark eyelashes. Very taking eyes they were: well set in his head and pleasantly intimate, with a near-sighted brilliancy.

“I didn’t say it was a poor substitute. And, anyhow, cocaine might charm away the hours, but only work can charm away the years. I’ve got into my stride--for eternity, it would seem. And some day, you know, I may, quite incidentally, do something in spectrum analysis that will be significant. I’ve got all the time in the world.”

“Are you so sure?”

“Well--it looks as if I were in for a long wait.”

He spoke as unconcernedly as if he had his lease of life locked up in his safe-deposit drawer.

I drank some whiskey and waited a minute, wondering whether to push his confidence over the edge, send it spinning into an abyss of revelation. Finally, I decided.

“I didn’t know that anything but a contract with the devil could make you so sure.”

“Oh, it doesn’t have to be with the devil.” He sipped his virtuous apollinaris. “Did you notice the heroine’s sister?” he went on.

I hadn’t noticed her much. I had been paying my money to see Maude Lansing act, and my frugal eyes had attached themselves to her exclusively, from the first act to the last.

“A vague little blonde thing, wasn’t she?”

“Blonde, but not so vague as you’d think. At least, I don’t think she’d be vague if you gave her anything to do. She had to be vague to-night, of course. But didn’t you see her deliberately subduing herself to the part--holding herself in, so as not to be too pretty, too angry, too subtle, too much in love? She did everything vaguely, I imagine, so as not to hog the stage. But give her a chance, and she’d play up. I was always expecting, you know, that she _would_ hog the stage. She could have done it.... It quite got me going.”