The word ‘ghost’ brings to the mind’s eye – shrinking even in thought – an apparition of the dead, the dank smell of death. At least that is how I used to take it; though I am sure I do not know why, for after all I believed, as we are all taught to believe, that the spirit – that impalpable essence of a ghost – is stronger than the body; and that being so there is no reason why it should not shake itself free at any time, and fluttering its wings be off on its own business, or pleasure, untrammeled by time or space. Why should there not be ghosts of the living as well as of the dead? Why – come to that – should not the word stand, simply and solely, for the true ego of any one of us?
Still, as I have said, there was that dread of the very word ‘ghost’ until we took Number Eight, The Paragon, Denis and I.
The Paragon was built in an oval, with a garden and plane trees in the centre of it; an oval of tall, narrow houses; all the rooms apart from the attics and basement panelled in white painted wood.
Some of the houses were detached or semi-detached. But Number Eight was not even this; though in some strange, spiritual way there was never any house more completely detached and aloof, so that I do not believe that it so much as acknowledged the others, unless by the support they gave it; any more than a proud woman of the exclusive Victorian day acknowledged the individuality of the servants who ministered to her wants.
Apart from a small writing-room, which fronted the staircase, the whole of the first floor was occupied by the drawing-room, running the entire depth of the house, with two tall, narrow windows at the front, overlooking the oval; an arch in the middle and a large rounded bay-window at the back.
From this window, above the hawthorns and laburnums, the one giant chestnut in the long narrow back garden, above the steep slope of the red-tiled roofs and chimneys of the lower part of the town, one caught a glimpse of the river, with its forest of masts and funnels, its haze of silvery smoke or mist; and far, far away, the blue hills of Highgate.
We took the house, furnished, through land agents and lawyers, without any real idea to whom it belonged. The drawing-room was done in silk rep of a palish green – neither emerald nor willow, but something between both – and a shiny chintz, white, powdered with tiny black specks and bunches of rose-buds. The writing-table was very small with a sloping top; the other tables, all of rosewood, and unnecessarily large, were like pools of reflected light dotted with islands of morocco-bound books. There were a good many mirrors and a good deal of valuable china, vases and Dresden figures and bowls filled with pot-pourri, the scent of which permeated the whole room and the landing outside.
It sounds like a silly sort of a room, but it had charm as everything which belongs to a past generation does have, at least for me; and during that exceptionally hot summer it was grateful as a woodland bathing pool, overhung with willows.
Denis and I laughed at it and laughed at ourselves for liking it, but like it we did; not only the drawing-room but the whole house; the elegant twirl of the staircase; our immense mahogany bed, the huge wardrobe, the washing-ware – big basin and jug and tiny basin and jug side by side, like mother and child; the scent in the upper rooms, not of pot-pourri but sandal-wood: sandal-wood everywhere, in the drawers and wardrobes – wardrobes like houses.
Still, it was the drawing-room which held me most. Young and newly married, one of a large, cheerful family, I had begun by being almost unendurably restless during the long hours when Denis was away attending to his duties at Woolwich; noisy too, banging doors and swishing about, singing, whistling, too busy to settle down to anything.
But the drawing-room at Number Eight quietened me; so that before a couple of months had passed, the rather boisterous spring merged into a tranquil summer, I moved more sedately. How Denis laughed when I replaced my high-heeled shoes, with their irritating tap over the polished floors, with a pair of child’s flat dancing slippers; while for the first time in my life I sat down to sewing – hand sewing, none of that feverish rattle and whirr of a machine, with the good, the tender excuse that the tiniest of all garments call for the softest of seams.
Hour after hour I sat still in that pensive room with the wash of pale, green-tinted air passing through its entire length from window to window – I who had been for ever on the jig, never for one moment alone – choosing by preference what must have been known as the back drawing-room; laying down my work for long intervals at a time, and gazing out of the window over that expanse of which I have already spoken.
At first my mind was curiously blank; then – for the first time in my life, as with the sewing – I began to think; to reflect, to speculate, with no chance of running myself out in words, upon life: suffering; the unreason, the waste: generation after generation like seasons, waxing and waning: the hopes of spring: the fulfilment of summer; the ripening and decay of autumn; and then old age and death, like a shut mouth, grim and undeviatingly silent. Along with all this I pictured my mother’s thoughts and feelings before my own birth: my own unborn child grown to maturity and I, myself, with all earthly desires dropping from me like leaves from a tree: Denis and I old, old people, having spent years in the difficult support of life which must inevitably end, for all our pains; a life which could, by no manner of means, prove uninterruptedly happy. Though, after all, what was happiness? For the first time in my life, twenty-two long years, I differentiated between happiness and pleasure, amusements.
The days, wonderful late spring and early summer days, flowed by me like the air. I grew curiously intimate with the portraits on the white wall, water colours and pastels of young women in short-waisted dresses and side curls; young naval officers with immensely high collars; an admiral smiling and scowling: a group of children with a liver-and-white spaniel: a portly divine in a black gown with white bands. I knew them all, I even talked to them – to them, and to that other.
Denis caught me at it one day. I felt like a lunatic and said so: ‘Everyone’s a bit queer at these sort of times,’ that was the excuse I made, though he had showed no special surprise; I remembered that later, puzzled over it; for after all, we were not the sort of people who, normally, talked to ourselves.
‘You’re far too much alone.’ Even that was tentative, at half question. ‘Why don’t you have Stella here?’ – Stella was my sister – ‘or if you can’t stand relations, one of your own friends to stay with you for a bit? Molly Seton, or that Morris girl you used to be such desperate pals with?’
Stella! – Molly Seton, the Morris girl! In that house with – well, with that!
‘I don’t feel as though I were alone,’ I answered slowly, thinking not so much of my words as of the queer meaning they had for me.
‘You don’t seem very sure about it.’ Denis eyed me curiously; if I had not been so wrapped up in myself, I might have known that he too was wondering, trying to find out, test something he himself guessed at, the something which I might have in my own mind.
‘Dear thing, all I know is that I’ve never been so happy in all my life.’
‘Oh, well, so long as you are happy – though it doesn’t do to mope; nothing so bad as moping, my mater says; and she ought to know, with eight of us all told.’ He was very abrupt and matter-of-fact; a little disappointed too, or so it seemed.
But what could I have said? Even if I had realized what it was he wanted to get at: for it was only just then that things really began to shape themselves, become definite; that I, myself, was able to separate realities from pleasant, half-dreaming fancies.
It fixed itself like this, with odd simplicity and clearness. There was a tall vase of clouded glass standing upon one of the many tables in the drawing-room, and when I arranged it with some tall sprays of delphinium I had known the risk I was taking; for it was ridiculously badly balanced, as all Victorian vases are, fashioned for short-stemmed, dumpy bouquets.
The parlour-maid came into the room with a letter; there was a whisk of air between the two windows and the door, and in a moment the vase was over, with a thin stream of water – luckily the thing held next to nothing – running over the table and in among the books.
I called to Ada, but she had noticed nothing, was already half out of the room – one of those tiresome bustling servants – going about their work in a sort of whirlwind, very starched and clean-looking, and nothing more to them.
I jumped to my feet, but someone else was before me. I heard an exclamation which was like a breath of dismay: I saw – yes, I saw it, as plainly as I can see my own hand, now, stretched out in front of me – a small white hand, a wisp of a handkerchief, stemming the stream. There was some effort to raise the vase – I felt rather than saw this; but the sigh at the sense of failure was plain enough, following upon that first exclamation of dismay:
‘Oh dear, oh dear!’
It was all like that, the keeping in order I mean, the anxiety over the precious trifles in that tenderly cared-for house, a casket of reliquaries. Sometimes, indeed, it seemed almost beyond bounds. ‘Fussing?’ No, no – Heaven only knows what I would have called it if I had been subjected to it from any of my own people; but here and now, and coming in the fashion it did, I rather liked it. It gave me a sense of being looked after; for that somebody, whom we seemed to have taken over along with the house, was concerned about me too: sometimes of set purpose, or so it seemed; sometimes because it fitted in that way. For ten to one if the sun threatened the rep curtains or chair-covers, it was tiresomely in my eyes also, though I was too indolent to get up and draw the blinds; lazily watching for, expecting, the hand on the cord, the faint flash of turquoise and diamonds – and for a long time that was all I saw.
Running down the polished stairs too – did someone really exhort me to be careful, was it in the air, so to speak, or did I just imagine it? Anyhow, there was nothing of irritation in my quick – ‘All right, all right!’ While there was real pleasure in the thought that someone else was watchful over the new life already so dear to me.
All the same, there was one thing that did really irritate me, and such a little thing, too. A tall candlestick of turned mahogany stood at Denis’ side of the bed. Now Denis never reads in bed and I do, so what more natural than that I should transfer it to my side? – or more exasperating than that it should, each night, be moved back to its old place?
I tried it again, and again and again and again, until my irritation melted into amusement, and the thing became a quite good-natured duel between myself and that other. One night I actually heard it being moved, the soft ‘tut, tut’ to which I had become accustomed, followed by a distinct banging down – something like temper there! – of the candlestick upon the little table at the further side.
Jumping up, I walked round the foot of the bed in the moonlight, recaptured it and put it back in the place I myself had chosen for it.
‘If you go on like that we shall have to leave the house,’ I said firmly, and there was a gasp of dismay, followed by a soft chuckle – proving a distinct sense of humour, for It – oh, but why should I pretend like that? – She, bless her heart, knew that I was joking; was as sure as I myself that I could not bear the thought of my child being born elsewhere.
To my surprise, Denis – who I had thought was asleep – broke in with:
‘Easy, old girl. Though, by Jove, it really is getting a bit beyond a joke!’
‘What?’ I almost screamed at him in my surprise.
‘Well, the way she goes on. One can’t call the place one’s own. As for dropping cigarette ashes on the carpet! You should just have seen her face – never again, as I value my life!’
‘Seen!’ I was amazed, and dreadfully jealous: Denis to steal such a march upon me! ‘Seen! Oh no, it’s impossible!’
‘What! Do you mean to say you haven’t seen her?’
‘Well, no, not exactly,’ I admitted grudgingly, ‘her hand, the whisk of a flounce of handkerchief.’
‘Well, I’ve seen her,’ his voice was almost unctuous with pride. ‘Look here, light that candle, I suppose it’s still at your side.’
‘I’ve got my hand on it – firmly.’ I struck a light and we both sat up in bed, for this was the sort of thing that was not to be taken lying down. But for Denis – Denis who, for all that he was such a darling, I had taken as being, in the nicest sort of man-way, a trifle insensitive – to have seen her, actually seen her, was almost beyond bearing.
‘But not really – a sort of shadow – not like a real person,’ I protested stupidly.
‘My dear, she wears a cameo brooch and frocks which touch the ground all the way round – buttoned up to her throat; rows of buttons; and sometimes a fold of lace round her neck, and a what do you call it? – a sort of chest protector of lace stuff.’
‘A plastron?’
‘I don’t know what the devil the thing is, but I’ve seen old ladies wearing them in real life. Not that she’s not real enough! Grey hair puffed out over her ears and a little pink-and-white face, all crumpled up like the petal of a poppy-bud; her mouth drawn together – a tight bud that, but awfully sweet. A good deal bothered with us, the liberties we take with the house, and yet amused, at times; liking us on the whole – sort of tender and wistful. That night when you refused to come up to bed because you were in some sort of a paddy with me – remember that, eh, silly kid! – and I picked you up and carried you upstairs, she drew aside on the landing with a rustle of silk – queer sort of silks she wears, colours running into each other all the time, so you can’t tell t’other from which –’
‘Shot silk?’
‘– Maybe, I’m hanged if I know – anyhow, she drew back to let us pass, flattened out against the wall, and laughed – a charming laugh, so soft and really amused; sort of way as though she liked us to be there and young and in love – eh, old thing? – though we do make hay of her house.’
‘Her house – Den, does that mean that you think …?’
We were slipping into that careless married fashion of not finishing our sentences, taking the understanding for granted.
‘Well, that’s what I do think, that it belongs to her.’
‘Belonged, you mean, centuries, oh centuries ago!’ I don’t know why, but the thought of anyone not seen being near, really near – in point of time, more than anything else – gave me the creeps. ‘Ghosts don’t come – well, all at once.’
‘Don’t you believe it, my dear.’
‘Well, I shall know when I’ve seen her. The cheek of it! to let you see her and not me, when I think of the liberties she takes; straightening the things on my dressing-table and all – and they do belong to me. Why, she won’t even let me leave my rings about loose, hangs them all up on the little china tree thing.’
‘She must have taken tremendous care of everything. Look at those polished tables; by Jove, there’s not a stain on any single one of them – the Lord only knows what would have happened if I put down a lighted cigarette, or anything like that.’
‘The wonder is that the people who came after didn’t mess up the things.’
‘You bet your life there weren’t any, we’re the first and only tenants – that’s why she feels it so.’
‘Oh, Den, but that’s impossible.’ I was obstinate upon that point.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, ghosts don’t come like that – at once.’
‘She’s not a ghost, I tell you, at least not in the ordinary way. I ought to know, I’ve seen her.’
That piqued me: ‘If she’s a ghost, she’s dead – dead as a doornail, all ghosts are, so don’t be silly,’ I said, and turning round on my side I loosed my hold on the candlestick and blew out the candle.
It was in the same place when I awoke next morning, and for some reason or other this made me feel ashamed, in disgrace, left to my own miserable, haphazard ways.
The whole of that day I heard and felt nothing of her, not so much as a breath. ‘I’ve hurt her,’ I thought, ‘perhaps she’ll go away and I will never see her after all.’
I made my confession the first thing when Denis appeared home that night, contrite and abashed; feeling very small, curled up on his knee in the half light before dinner.
‘I knew she was really alive, knew it the whole time; only I was jealous – just frightfully jealous, Den – I didn’t know it was in me.’
‘Jealous! Of a ghost?’
‘Idiot! Of you seeing her and not me. But what do you think – really think?’
‘Well, they say that there are – it sounds utter bunkum, but still there you have it – and I won’t believe for a single moment that she’s really dead – emanations or manifestations, or something of that sort. Supposing anyone was everlastingly longing to be back in some place they loved most frightfully – longing and longing, thinking of nothing else; you know when you long for anything like that the way you feel as though something were emptied out of you – it does seem that they might sort of slough themselves clear of the restrictions of space; yearn their spirits out of their bodies – actual bodies – dragging the appearance of it with them. If she, the little lady, had never lived anywhere else, loved this house in the way we love each other, she might – it seems feasible enough – almost must come back to it.’
‘She – you speak as though you know who she was.’
‘Why, the owner, of course.’ He looked surprised, and no wonder; though it seemed strange to realize that Denis, whom I had thought of as much less subtle than myself, should have jumped at once to what I now realized as the only possible conclusion.
‘Our landlady – oh, Den, but it makes us feel awful outsiders, frightfully in the way! Are you sure, though – was it a woman we got the house from?’
‘I can’t be certain. Don’t you remember we just took it through the agent? – but of course it must be. Anyhow, we’ll go and see him and find out to-morrow.’
All that evening I went softly, shy and ill at ease, a little resentful; once in bed, however, that queer feeling of half-amused tenderness came back to me. I had planted the disputed candlestick down, almost aggressively, on my own side of the bed, but I now leant across Denis and put it back in its old place. After all, she had been used to have it there, sleeping all alone in that great bed: and where was the sense of letting her worry her soul further out of her poor little body, frail enough already in all conscience as Denis saw it?
We went and saw the house-agent next day, finding him as florid and bland as most of his breed are: a forced geniality masking the most complete indifference to damp and drains, along with life and death in general; that same species of geniality as is achieved by the really competent trained nurse.
It seemed that he could not tell us anything more than we already knew of the owner of the house: a lady – that was all he was sure of, and everything arranged through the lawyers.
We left things as they were for close upon a month after this, and then I began to get really fussed, and so did Denis. By this time we both saw her equally clearly, and it could but strike us that she was somehow or other failing, the heart going out of her. She no longer kept us in such order: that familiar ‘tut, tut’ gave place to a sigh. I believed that she lay upon the sofa, one of those inconveniently curved and ridiculously small contraptions of Victorian days, for at times I found the cushion dented: my cushions, too, the originals being worked in Berlin wool and beads – there was one of Rebecca at the well, all beads, and only imagine the impress of that against one’s cheek! Anyhow, it comforts me now to feel that she did like my cushions, immense and downy; though the very fact of their not being shaken up after use was enough to show you how she was changing! Why, in the beginning – no, even towards the middle part of our acquaintance, she never missed tucking in the loose chintz covers after Denis or his friends had been lounging on the chairs or sofa: more pretending to be horrified than anything else, I think, because there is no doubt about it she liked them, laughed at their jokes if they weren’t too – oh, well, you know, too modern; the sort of things we do joke about in mixed company nowadays.
Oh yes, there was no doubt about it that she was failing, wearied and played out to indifference: failing and fading, her dear little face growing pinched and pale, her frock rubbed and worn; her plastron – why on earth couldn’t they have called them plasters and have done with it? – flattened out and depressed looking.
Then one day she came and stood by the drawing-room fire – for by this time the days were getting chilly, the summer nearly at an end – with one hand on the mantelshelf staring down into the blaze, with just such an air of dwindled faintness as those pale water-colours; so wistful that my heart bled for her.
‘Oh, do, do, do tell me what it is,’ I cried; but she only shook her head, straightened a couple of little Dresden figures on the shelf and moved away with a sigh.
It was not until she was gone that I realized what was wrong with her hands – the rings, turquoise and diamond, all gone, nothing but a fine gold keeper left; while the low-heeled, slim slipper on the foot turned sideways upon the twirly steel fender was rubbed and worn at the side, almost in holes.
‘Something’s got to be done,’ I said to Denis when he came home that evening. ‘She’s got so frightfully thin, and what do you think – her rings are gone; just slipping off, I suppose, poor dear!’
‘There may be another reason.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, hard up, and all that, you know.’
‘Denis!’
For a moment or so we gazed at each other in dismay.
‘I believe you’re right,’ I said at last. ‘Always the same dress, and getting very shabby. Oh – but very shabby; her shoes too. Fretting her soul out of her body, if she’s really alive …’ I paused; even then I could not really grasp it. ‘And poor as poor. Well, if she is alive – and she won’t be for long if she goes on like this – she’ll have to come back here. We’ll go and see that lawyer man to-morrow, eh, Denny?’
‘You can’t move house at this juncture, young woman, let me tell you that.’
‘Well, I don’t see why we should move; the place is big enough in all conscience.’
‘Peggy!’ I can never forget his look of amazement. ‘You! You who wouldn’t have anyone, not even one of your own people, here!’
‘Well, she is my own people! After all, one has spiritual countries of one’s own, places which are native to one from the first moment one sees them. And why not spiritual relations, who are far more real relations than the brothers and sisters and children of the man your mother happened to marry; or the woman your father married, either? They only pleased themselves, never really thought of us, or the sort of people that we might like to belong to us. But I’ve lived in the same house with her for six months, and know her and her dear little soft pernickety ways; and I’m sure she’ll be a good influence for Thing-um-y-jig – particularly if it’s going to be a girl,’ I added ungrammatically: ‘Thing-um-y-jig’ being the temporary name with which we had endowed the impending offspring; anything to make out, even to each other, that we did not care, that there was no sort of sentiment about either of us.
‘Well, the Lord knows I’ll be only too glad for you to have someone with you, and it will be some sort of a help to her, too, if it’s really come to that – pawning her rings and that sort of thing, you know.’
‘Oh, Denis, it’s too piteous, and here we are making ourselves at home in her house all the time.’
‘But look here, old thing, after all there is the rent!’ It was the first time we had either of us so much as thought of it. ‘She can’t actually starve on five guineas a week, you know.’
‘Perhaps there are debts. That perfectly horrid-looking man in the portrait over the mantelpiece in the dining-room, with the leer and the underlip, and the too fine eyes, for instance – Her father? What do you think?’
‘Brother more likely; she’s old enough. Blown everything, the devil, and left her to clear up the mess. Anyhow, we’ll hunt out the lawyers to-morrow; and it’s time for bed now. Come along, old thing.’
We turned out the lamps and left the room; at the door I turned and tweaked Denis’ sleeve. The dying fire had flared up in a spurt of flame, and there she was; her arm resting along the mantelshelf, her head drooping upon it – too dispirited even to draw back her skirt from the heat of the fire, and that alone would have shown you if you had known as much of her as I did.
She looked up and gazed around her. For the moment Denis and I were wiped completely out of the picture; I realized that, while the gaze of those pale, wonderfully candid blue eyes was so yearning, so intense and tender that there was no mistaking what it was – a sort of good-bye, a drawing to herself once more, and maybe for the last time, everything that she loved best.
We went up to London next day – for it is only the post-office people who count us as already in it. At first I thought that the lawyer – who looked, as they say of wine, as though he had been ‘laid down’ for a very long time, his shoulders showing a pure bottle-like slope, his face cobwebby with fine wrinkles – established, or rather binned into, a set of frowsty chambers in Bedford Row, would tell us nothing; but Denis, who can charm a bird off a bough when he likes, gained his point with some very mellifluous lying, something about feeling that we really weren’t paying so much for the house as it was worth, and we got her name, Miss Julia Champneys – Julia! Could it have been anything else? Julia, the soft syllables of it! – and the address of a boarding-house in Bloomsbury – such a boarding-house, too!
The maid who answered the door, with an apology for a cap at the back of her head, a general air of having been dragged backward through a gorse-bush, and that insolence which always goes with a certain type of imbecility, said she did not know if Miss Champneys would see us.
‘She’s here in her room, sick; I ain’t sure as she’ll see anyone,’ that’s what she said, scratching the instep of one foot with the heel of the other; though after some time, helped by the passing of a coin, we prevailed upon her to show us up into the drawing-room and go and find out.
Drawing-room! – drawing-room! This after the exquisite order and restfulness of Number Eight! What could the bedrooms be like in a house with public reception-rooms such as this? – A mausoleum, with crumbs in the crack of every chair, the dust of ages over the tables, and more woollen-ball-fringed antimacassars than I had ever seen in all my life before; small wonder that our landlady’s soul had, at times, longed itself clean out of her body.
After a while the unspeakable maid came to tell us that she would be there ‘in a brace of shakes’, and then after another considerable pause – I had an idea that she had to travel downwards from the very top storey, some horrible, chilly, sloping-roofed place, for she was blue with cold and trembling with exhaustion – Miss Champneys herself appeared; desperately anxious, her wide blue eyes scared, her mouth tight with small perpendicular lines, braced up against disaster; for it was clear enough that our presence had put the fear of God into her – Denis’ expression, not mine – that she made sure we’d come with some complaint about the house, some idea of wriggling out of our agreement, for her very first words were:
‘If there’s anything I can do to meet you in any way, if there’s anything not quite right –’ She broke off, staring; timid and bewildered as she well might be. Denis and I had been holding hands like two children when she came into the room, I myself frankly clinging; for – Oh, well, after all, it is not the sort of thing that happens every day, meeting the reality of an appearance, I mean, and she was so like, so precisely and amazingly like – stupid of us to be more scared by that than by anything else; but there it was, though after all it was not only our gaucherie which took her aback. There was more to it than this – amazement on her side, too; a slow dawning, unwilling realization, a painful acknowledgment of something which, at first sight, seemed impossible, upsetting every sort of calculation.
‘Oh! – but I didn’t realize – I couldn’t have believed that – the maid said Mr and Mrs Maudesley, and of course I knew that was the name of the tenants, but – but not you – oh, not you!’ She wrung her hands together in despair, those thin little hands, as though confronted with some idea which she could not get round: ‘I made a mistake, confused you with – Oh, I don’t know – I don’t know – it’s beyond me, that’s what it is – beyond me. Why, all this time –’ She shook her head trembling from head to foot, her face white and piteous, the tears running down her cheeks. ‘You – you who I thought –’ Her gaze was all for Denis. – ‘Oh, of course, of course, at Number Eight – but I didn’t realize – that’s it, I didn’t realize –’
I was on my knees at one side of her, Denis in a low chair at the other; we both held a thin white hand, patting it – I had the one with the thin gold keeper. The whole affair was so completely incredible that it was impossible for anything to seem more out of the way – outrageous, than it was. I even took out my own handkerchief and dried her eyes, pressed one hand to my cheek and kissed it; murmuring over her:
‘Don’t worry, dear, it’s all right – indeed it’s all right!’
‘I thought – I thought –’ She turned from one to the other, her confusion far greater than ours; for, after all, she was true to – what do they call it? – oh, sample – too wonderfully, wonderfully true; every fold of her dress, the rubbed sides of her satin slippers, showing how she sat with her tiny feet crossed – the dear ghost of Number Eight. But she herself was only too evidently disappointed, taken aback, and that hurt me; for we really are – oh well, quite nice.
‘What did you think – what could you think? Of course we knew you, you are part of the house – the house we love. But Denis and I? Why – oh, but you don’t like us!’ I was shocked to the soul.
‘I do – I do! I always liked you, loved you. Only I didn’t know – oh, I didn’t know,’ she cried desperately, glancing from one to the other. ‘I went back to the house – you know I went back to the house?’
We nodded.
‘I couldn’t keep away. It seemed dreadful, poking and prying like that, with the place let and all, but believe me, I couldn’t keep away. Then when I saw you there – I am getting old and stupid, things confuse me – I forgot about the tenants; it was shocking of me, but I forgot – I quite forgot – I thought you were –’
‘Yes – yes?’ we bent nearer; I had one arm round her, fragile as a fledgling bird. ‘Only just met her,’ you say? Why, hadn’t I lived with her for weeks and weeks and weeks, at a time when I was thinking and feeling more than I had ever done in all my life before? And anyhow, what does the length of time since you have first actually met a person matter, one way or another?
‘Yes, yes,’ I prompted her, ‘you thought …?’
‘I don’t know – I don’t really know what I thought.’ She shook her head helplessly. ‘But – my dear – I wasn’t always old – people were kind enough to say I was a pretty girl once – and it seemed to me that you were myself, as I used to be, and that you, sir’ – she turned and faced Denis bravely, her crumpled cheeks pink, her eyes like sapphires, ‘you – you, who are young enough to have been my son – were the gentleman whom I was once going to marry, and who was killed just before our wedding day. It sounds very silly, as everything of that sort does sound silly from old people, though I’m sure I don’t know why – and maybe you’ll think I am queer in my head – perhaps I am – sometimes I am afraid of that, but there it is – I quite forgot – it was dreadful of me, but I quite forgot about the tenants. You did not seem like real people, you know, just tenants; and it seemed that, perhaps, having given up the house and gone away, which was a very great wrench to me – for I had never lived anywhere else – that – I don’t know I’m sure, I don’t know – but it seemed that I was to be given a sort of dream life as a compensation; one feels so dreadfully young inside, that’s the worst of it all – so young and full of hope. Don’t you see – oh, don’t you see?’ She spoke almost fiercely, beating her two small, ringless hands up and down upon her knee. ‘I didn’t know what was true – I didn’t want to know.’
‘But lately, dear Miss Champneys,’ I said, ‘lately you’ve not been so happy?’
She shook her head, gazing in front of her with so faraway an air that I believe, could I but have opened the door of the drawing-room at Number Eight, at that very moment, I would have found her there. ‘It has seemed to be slipping away – everything, everything, but the house. And even that seems difficult to reach – a long way off. I’m not very strong, I sometimes think – my heart, you know, so stupid – that the time will come when I may never see it again. Last night, for instance …’
She hesitated for so long that Denis prompted her: ‘Last night?’ with a glance across at me.
‘Last night I thought I was saying good-bye to it for ever, and then nothing mattered: nothing! Not even he – the gentleman I spoke of, and who I was stupid enough to take for you, Mr Maudesley – nothing and nobody, only – only the house and the things in it. It is part of me, you see,’ she went on eagerly. ‘It really is a peculiarly lovely house, and it’s part of me, in the same sort of way’ – she flushed, turning her head a little aside, her eyes strained and wistful and very bright – ‘as I have always felt that married people must be part of each other. It seems as if I can never, never leave it, however much I want to, however much I know I ought to, so long as there is any life left in me.’
‘But you mustn’t leave it, you mustn’t live away from it; that’s really what we came about. You belong to each other,’ said Denis; then, hesitating a moment, ventured on a joke which sent my heart up into my mouth; but she took it well: ‘Why, it really isn’t moral for two people like you and that house to live apart.’
‘But there are reasons’ – she drew herself a little more upright, smiling, yet a trifle chilled, on her guard, as that generation is when it is driven to speak of pecuniary affairs – ‘private expenses and obligations which make it impossible. That is unless you don’t care for it, you are tired of it,’ a piteous blend of hope and anxiety chased themselves across the small, delicately-featured face.
‘It isn’t that, but we want you to come and stay with us. There isn’t any heart in the house without you.’
She flushed scarlet: ‘It’s sweet and dear of you; but I couldn’t – I really couldn’t! Why, I hardly –’
‘If you’re going to say you hardly know us, I can’t stand it!’ I broke in, rising to my feet and standing before her, with an odd sense of being half child and half judge, looking my very worst, I know, awkward and frightfully determined. ‘Look here, I’m supposed to be going to have a baby, and I know something will go wrong if you’re not there at Number Eight. Anyhow, I won’t have it at all in that case – so there!’ I added, perfectly ridiculously.
‘She’s too much alone, it would be awfully kind of you,’ put in Denis.
‘Oh, if it’s that – if I can really be of any use –’ The little old lady rose from her chair, clinging to both our hands, trembling from head to foot. ‘Oh, my dears, if you only knew what it will mean – like going to heaven – like other people’s heaven!’
She said it again when we parted from her on the landing, for she would not let us take her upstairs back to her own room: ‘It will be like going to heaven.’
I went downstairs with Denis, and then ran up again halfway – I dared not venture on more – and listening, heard her move very slowly up that intolerable flight of stairs; with a long pause between every two or three steps, a still longer one at each landing.
The tousled maid came brushing past me with a bucket, and I pressed a ten-shilling note into her hand:
‘Don’t let her come down again to-day; and see to her, help her pack – my husband’s coming to fetch her away to-morrow.’
I believe that she did her best; anyhow, she took her tea up to her own room – and one knows what that means in such places, the utmost concession – it came out later, because:
‘She was all right when I took her tea up to her,’ that’s what she said, crying – actually crying. ‘A bit excited and trembly like, that’s all!’
I could not settle to anything that evening, neither could Denis; though we were oddly scared of putting our fears into words even to each other.
She had never come into the dining-room – I fancy that she must have shirked that portrait – but anyhow, he left the door open for her, jumped on the parlour-maid when she shut it, naturally enough, for it was a chilly evening, colder in the house than out of doors, or so it seemed.
Upstairs in the drawing-room, we each took a book; but I doubt if we either of us read a word. It was late when we got up to go to bed, and Denis was, oddly enough, making up the fire afresh, when he blurted it out – what I knew to be in both our minds:
‘I wish to goodness we’d brought her back with us!’ – for there was no sign or sound of her; while it seemed as though every room in the house had drawn itself close together, holding its breath, waiting for something which might be the end of a race.
By some odd chance the housemaid must have put the twisted candlestick at my side of the bed when she did the room; though I did not discover it until about two o’clock in the morning, when I could lie still no longer and stretched out my hand for the matches.
I thought I might have found her in the drawing-room. No, that’s wrong, I did not think, I hoped despairingly, for I knew – all the time I knew; I had heaped up the fire again, was crouched before it, determinedly waiting, when Denis came down and carried me up to bed in his arms, with no single word of rebuke, or – bless him for his understanding – false optimism.
For of course he knew, and I knew, and the house knew, that there was nothing really to wait for, that the life and soul – yes, yes, despite our own youth, and many friends, and the little Julia who came later – the real life and soul of the house had gone out of it.
Why did she say that, ‘Like going to heaven’? Oh, well, I’m sure she would not like heaven, the real heaven; I was bitterly, resentfully sure of that. To take her there, just then, when we were going to make her so happy. She would only peak and pine, I knew she would, was certain of it; so certain that for months and months I thought that God would set her free, that she would come back to us – and Number Eight.