“Come and sit down by me,” she entreated, sinking to a sofa. “It’s such an age since I’ve seen a living being!”

  Her choice of terms was certainly strange, and as she leaned back on the white slippery sofa and beckoned me with one of those unburied hands my impulse was to turn and run. But her old face, hovering there in the candle-light, with the unnaturally red cheeks like varnished apples and the blue eyes swimming in vague kindliness, seemed to appeal to me against my cowardice, to remind me that, dead or alive, Mary Pask would never harm a fly.

  “Do sit down!” she repeated, and I took the other corner of the sofa.

  “It’s so wonderfully good of you—I suppose Grace asked you to come?” She laughed again—her conversation had always been punctuated by rambling laughter. “It’s an event—quite an event! I’ve had so few visitors since my death, you see.”

  Another bucketful of cold water ran over me; but I looked at her resolutely, and again the innocence of her face disarmed me.

  I cleared my throat and spoke—with a huge panting effort, as if I had been heaving up a grave-stone. “You live here alone?” I brought out.

  “Ah, I’m glad to hear your voice—I still remember voices, though I hear so few,” she murmured dreamily. “Yes—I live here alone. The old woman you saw goes away at night. She won’t stay after dark . . . she says she can’t. Isn’t it funny? But it doesn’t matter; I like the darkness.” She leaned to me with one of her irrelevant smiles. “The dead,” she said, “naturally get used to it.”

  Once more I cleared my throat; but nothing followed.

  She continued to gaze at me with confidential blinks. “And Grace? Tell me all about my darling. I wish I could have seen her again . . . just once.” Her laugh came out grotesquely. “When she got the news of my death—were you with her? Was she terribly upset?”

  I stumbled to my feet with a meaningless stammer. I couldn’t answer—I couldn’t go on looking at her.

  “Ah, I see . . . it’s too painful,” she acquiesced, her eyes brimming, and she turned her shaking head away.

  “But after all . . . I’m glad she was so sorry . . . It’s what I’ve been longing to be told, and hardly hoped for. Grace forgets . . .” She stood up too and flitted across the room, wavering nearer and nearer to the door.

  “Thank God,” I thought, “she’s going.”

  “Do you know this place by daylight?” she asked abruptly.

  I shook my head.

  “It’s very beautiful. But you wouldn’t have seen me then. You’d have had to take your choice between me and the landscape. I hate the light—it makes my head ache. And so I sleep all day. I was just waking up when you came.” She smiled at me with an increasing air of confidence. “Do you know where I usually sleep? Down below there—in the garden!” Her laugh shrilled out again. “There’s a shady corner down at the bottom where the sun never bothers one. Sometimes I sleep there till the stars come out.”

  The phrase about the garden, in the consul’s cable, came back to me and I thought: “After all, it’s not such an unhappy state. I wonder if she isn’t better off than when she was alive?”

  Perhaps she was—but I was sure I wasn’t, in her company. And her way of sidling nearer to the door made me distinctly want to reach it before she did. In a rush of cowardice I strode ahead of her—but a second later she had the latch in her hand and was leaning against the panels, her long white raiment hanging about her like grave-clothes. She drooped her head a little side-ways and peered at me under her lashless lids.

  “You’re not going?” she reproached me.

  I dived down in vain for my missing voice, and silently signed that I was.

  “Going—going away? Altogether?” Her eyes were still fixed on me, and I saw two tears gather in their corners and run down over the red glistening circles on her cheeks. “Oh, but you mustn’t,” she said gently. “I’m too lonely . . .”

  I stammered something inarticulate, my eyes on the blue-nailed hand that grasped the latch. Suddenly the window behind us crashed open, and a gust of wind, surging in out of the blackness, extinguished the candle on the nearest chimney-corner. I glanced back nervously to see if the other candle were going out too.

  “You don’t like the noise of the wind? I do. It’s all I have to talk to . . . People don’t like me much since I’ve been dead. Queer, isn’t it? The peasants are so superstitious. At times I’m really lonely . . .” Her voice cracked in a last effort at laughter, and she swayed toward me, one hand still on the latch.

  “Lonely, lonely! If you knew how lonely! It was a lie when I told you I wasn’t! And now you come, and your face looks friendly . . . and you say you’re going to leave me! No—no—no—you shan’t! Or else, why did you come? It’s cruel . . . I used to think I knew what loneliness was . . . after Grace married, you know. Grace thought she was always thinking of me, but she wasn’t. She called me ‘darling,’ but she was thinking of her husband and children. I said to myself then: ‘You couldn’t be lonelier if you were dead.’ But I know better now . . . There’s been no loneliness like this last year’s . . . none! And sometimes I sit here and think: ‘If a man came along some day and took a fancy to you?’” She gave another wavering cackle. “Well, such things have happened, you know, even after youth’s gone . . . a man who’d had his troubles, too. But no one came till tonight . . . and now you say you’re going!” Suddenly she flung herself toward me. “Oh, stay with me, stay with me . . . just tonight . . . It’s so sweet and quiet here . . . No one need know . . . no one will ever come and trouble us.”

  I ought to have shut the window when the first gust came. I might have known there would soon be another, fiercer one. It came now, slamming back the loose-hinged lattice, filling the room with the noise of the sea and with wet swirls of fog, and dashing the other candle to the floor. The light went out, and I stood there—we stood there—lost to each other in the roaring coiling darkness. My heart seemed to stop beating; I had to fetch up my breath with great heaves that covered me with sweat. The door—the door—well, I knew I had been facing it when the candle went. Something white and wraith-like seemed to melt and crumple up before me in the night, and avoiding the spot where it had sunk away I stumbled around it in a wide circle, got the latch in my hand, caught my foot in a scarf or sleeve, trailing loose and invisible, and freed myself with a jerk from this last obstacle. I had the door open now. As I got into the hall I heard a whimper from the blackness behind me; but I scrambled on to the hall door, dragged it open and bolted out into the night. I slammed the door on that pitiful low whimper, and the fog and wind enveloped me in healing arms.

  III

  When I was well enough to trust myself to think about it all again I found that a very little thinking got my temperature up, and my heart hammering in my throat. No use . . . I simply couldn’t stand it . . . for I’d seen Grace Bridgeworth in crape, weeping over the cable, and yet I’d sat and talked with her sister, on the same sofa—her sister who’d been dead a year!

  The circle was a vicious one; I couldn’t break through it. The fact that I was down with fever the next morning might have explained it; yet I couldn’t get away from the clinging reality of the vision. Supposing it was a ghost I had been talking to, and not a mere projection of my fever? Supposing something survived of Mary Pask—enough to cry out to me the unuttered loneliness of a lifetime, to express at last what the living woman had always had to keep dumb and hidden? The thought moved me curiously—in my weakness I lay and wept over it. No end of women were like that, I supposed, and perhaps, after death, if they got their chance they tried to use it . . . Old tales and legends floated through my mind; the bride of Corinth, the mediæval vampire—but what names to attach to the plaintive image of Mary Pask!

  My weak mind wandered in and out among these visions and conjectures, and the longer I lived with them the more convinced I became that something which had been Mary Pask had talked with me that night . . . I made up my mind, when I was up again, to drive back to the place (in broad daylight, this time), to hunt out the grave in the garden—that “shady corner where the sun never bothers one”—and appease the poor ghost with a few flowers. But the doctors decided otherwise; and perhaps my weak will unknowingly abetted them. At any rate, I yielded to their insistence that I should be driven straight from my hotel to the train for Paris, and thence transshipped, like a piece of luggage, to the Swiss sanatorium they had in view for me. Of course I meant to come back when I was patched up again . . . and meanwhile, more and more tenderly, but more intermittently, my thoughts went back from my snow-mountain to that wailing autumn night above the Baie des Trépassés, and the revelation of the dead Mary Pask who was so much more real to me than ever the living one had been.

  IV

  After all, why should I tell Grace Bridgeworth—ever? I had had a glimpse of things that were really no business of hers. If the revelation had been vouchsafed to me, ought I not to bury it in those deepest depths where the inexplicable and the unforgettable sleep together? And besides, what interest could there be to a woman like Grace in a tale she could neither understand nor believe in? She would just set me down as “queer”—and enough people had done that already. My first object, when I finally did get back to New York, was to convince everybody of my complete return to mental and physical soundness; and into this scheme of evidence my experience with Mary Pask did not seem to fit. All things considered, I would hold my tongue.

  But after a while the thought of the grave began to trouble me. I wondered if Grace had ever had a proper grave-stone put on it. The queer neglected look of the house gave me the idea that perhaps she had done nothing—had brushed the whole matter aside, to be attended to when she next went abroad. “Grace forgets,” I heard the poor ghost quaver . . . No, decidedly, there could be no harm in putting (tactfully) just that one question about the care of the grave; the more so as I was beginning to reproach myself for not having gone back to see with my own eyes how it was kept . . .

  Grace and Horace welcomed me with all their old friendliness, and I soon slipped into the habit of dropping in on them for a meal when I thought they were likely to be alone. Nevertheless my opportunity didn’t come at once—I had to wait for some weeks. And then one evening, when Horace was dining out and I sat alone with Grace, my glance lit on a photograph of her sister—an old faded photograph which seemed to meet my eyes reproachfully.

  “By the way, Grace,” I began with a jerk, “I don’t believe I ever told you: I went down to that little place of . . . of your sister’s the day before I had that bad relapse.”

  At once her face lit up emotionally. “No, you never told me. How sweet of you to go!” The ready tears overbrimmed her eyes. “I’m so glad you did.” She lowered her voice and added softly: “And did you see her?”

  The question sent one of my old shudders over me. I looked with amazement at Mrs. Bridgeworth’s plump face, smiling at me through a veil of painless tears. “I do reproach myself more and more about darling Mary,” she added tremulously. “But tell me—tell me everything.”

  There was a knot in my throat; I felt almost as uncomfortable as I had in Mary Pask’s own presence. Yet I had never before noticed anything uncanny about Grace Bridgeworth. I forced my voice up to my lips.

  “Everything? Oh, I can’t—” I tried to smile.

  “But you did see her?”

  I managed to nod, still smiling.

  Her face grew suddenly haggard—yes, haggard! “And the change was so dreadful that you can’t speak of it? Tell me—was that it?”

  I shook my head. After all, what had shocked me was that the change was so slight—that between being dead and alive there seemed after all to be so little difference, except that of a mysterious increase in reality. But Grace’s eyes were still searching me insistently. “You must tell me,” she reiterated. “I know I ought to have gone there long ago—”

  “Yes; perhaps you ought.” I hesitated. “To see about the grave, at least . . .”

  She sat silent, her eyes still on my face. Her tears had stopped, but her look of solicitude slowly grew into a stare of something like terror. Hesitatingly, almost reluctantly, she stretched out her hand and laid it on mine for an instant. “Dear old friend—” she began.

  “Unfortunately,” I interrupted, “I couldn’t get back myself to see the grave . . . because I was taken ill the next day . . .”

  “Yes, yes; of course. I know.” She paused. “Are you sure you went there at all?” she asked abruptly.

  “Sure? Good Lord—” It was my turn to stare. “Do you suspect me of not being quite right yet?” I suggested with an uneasy laugh.

  “No—no . . . of course not . . . but I don’t understand.”

  “Understand what? I went into the house . . . I saw everything, in fact, but her grave . . .”

  “Her grave?” Grace jumped up, clasping her hands on her breast and darting away from me. At the other end of the room she stood and gazed, and then moved slowly back.

  “Then, after all—I wonder?” She held her eyes on me, half fearful and half reassured. “Could it be simply that you never heard?”

  “Never heard?”

  “But it was in all the papers! Don’t you ever read them? I meant to write . . . I thought I had written . . . but I said: ‘At any rate he’ll see it in the papers’ . . . You know I’m always lazy about letters . . .”

  “See what in the papers?”

  “Why, that she didn’t die . . . She isn’t dead! There isn’t any grave, my dear man! It was only a cataleptic trance . . . An extraordinary case, the doctors say . . . But didn’t she tell you all about it—if you say you saw her?” She burst into half-hysterical laughter: “Surely she must have told you that she wasn’t dead?”

  “No,” I said slowly, “she didn’t tell me that.”

  We talked about it together for a long time after that—talked on till Horace came back from his men’s dinner, after midnight. Grace insisted on going in and out of the whole subject, over and over again. As she kept repeating, it was certainly the only time that poor Mary had ever been in the papers. But though I sat and listened patiently I couldn’t get up any real interest in what she said. I felt I should never again be interested in Mary Pask, or in anything concerning her.

  BEWITCHED

  I

  The snow was still falling thickly when Orrin Bosworth, who farmed the land south of Lonetop, drove up in his cutter to Saul Rutledge’s gate. He was surprised to see two other cutters ahead of him. From them descended two muffled figures. Bosworth, with increasing surprise, recognized Deacon Hibben, from North Ashmore, and Sylvester Brand, the widower, from the old Bearcliff farm on the way to Lonetop.

  It was not often that anybody in Hemlock County entered Saul Rutledge’s gate; least of all in the dead of winter, and summoned (as Bosworth, at any rate, had been) by Mrs. Rutledge, who passed, even in that unsocial region, for a woman of cold manners and solitary character. The situation was enough to excite the curiosity of a less imaginative man than Orrin Bosworth.

  As he drove in between the broken-down white gateposts topped by fluted urns the two men ahead of him were leading their horses to the adjoining shed. Bosworth followed, and hitched his horse to a post. Then the three tossed off the snow from their shoulders, clapped their numb hands together, and greeted each other.

  “Hallo, Deacon.”

  “Well, well, Orrin—” They shook hands.

  “’Day, Bosworth,” said Sylvester Brand, with a brief nod. He seldom put any cordiality into his manner, and on this occasion he was still busy about his horse’s bridle and blanket.

  Orrin Bosworth, the youngest and most communicative of the three, turned back to Deacon Hibben, whose long face, queerly blotched and mouldy-looking, with blinking peering eyes, was yet less forbidding than Brand’s heavily-hewn countenance.

  “Queer, our all meeting here this way. Mrs. Rutledge sent me a message to come,” Bosworth volunteered.

  The Deacon nodded. “I got a word from her too—Andy Pond come with it yesterday noon. I hope there’s no trouble here—”

  He glanced through the thickening fall of snow at the desolate front of the Rutledge house, the more melancholy in its present neglected state because, like the gate-posts, it kept traces of former elegance. Bosworth had often wondered how such a house had come to be built in that lonely stretch between North Ashmore and Cold Corners. People said there had once been other houses like it, forming a little township called Ashmore, a sort of mountain colony created by the caprice of an English Royalist officer, one Colonel Ashmore, who had been murdered by the Indians, with all his family, long before the Revolution. This tale was confirmed by the fact that the ruined cellars of several smaller houses were still to be discovered under the wild growth of the adjoining slopes, and that the Communion plate of the moribund Episcopal church of Cold Corners was engraved with the name of Colonel Ashmore, who had given it to the church of Ashmore in the year 1723. Of the church itself no traces remained. Doubtless it had been a modest wooden edifice, built on piles, and the conflagration which had burnt the other houses to the ground’s edge had reduced it utterly to ashes. The whole place, even in summer, wore a mournful solitary air, and people wondered why Saul Rutledge’s father had gone there to settle.

  “I never knew a place,” Deacon Hibben said, “as seemed as far away from humanity. And yet it ain’t so in miles.”

  “Miles ain’t the only distance,” Orrin Bosworth answered; and the two men, followed by Sylvester Brand, walked across the drive to the front door. People in Hemlock County did not usually come and go by their front doors, but all three men seemed to feel that, on an occasion which appeared to be so exceptional, the usual and more familiar approach by the kitchen would not be suitable.