He spent the day in rather fruitlessly considering his situation. He had hoped the morning would bring counsel, but it brought only courage and resolution, and these were of small use without enlightenment. Suddenly he remembered that the caravan going south from the coast would pass near the castle that afternoon. Gosling had dwelt on the date often enough, for it was the caravan which was to bring the box of Perrier water.

  “Well, I’m not sorry for that,” Medford reflected, with a slight shrinking of the flesh. Something sick and viscous, half smell, half substance, seemed to have clung to his skin since his morning bath, and the idea of having to drink that water again was nauseating.

  But his chief reason for welcoming the caravan was the hope of finding in it some European, or at any rate some native official from the coast, to whom he might confide his anxiety. He hung about, listening and waiting, and then mounted to the roof to gaze northward along the trail. But in the afternoon glow he saw only three Bedouins guiding laden pack-mules toward the castle.

  As they mounted the steep path he recognized some of Almodham’s men, and guessed at once that the southward caravan trail did not actually pass under the walls and that the men had been out to meet it, probably at a small oasis behind some fold of the sand-hills. Vexed at his own thoughtlessness in not foreseeing such a possibility, Medford dashed down to the court, hoping the men might have brought back some news of Almodham, though, as the latter had ridden south, he could at best only have crossed the trail by which the caravan had come. Still, even so, someone might know something, some report might have been heard—since everything was always known in the desert.

  As Medford reached the court, angry vociferations, and retorts as vehement, rose from the stable-yard. He leaned over the wall and listened. Hitherto nothing had surprised him more than the silence of the place. Gosling must have had a strong arm to subdue the shrill voices of his underlings. Now they had all broken loose, and it was Gosling’s own voice—usually so discreet and measured—which dominated them.

  Gosling, master of all the desert dialects, was cursing his subordinates in a half-dozen.

  “And you didn’t bring it—and you tell me it wasn’t there, and I tell you it was, and that you know it, and that you either left it on a sand-heap while you were jawing with some of those slimy fellows from the coast, or else fastened it on to the horse so carelessly that it fell off on the way—and all of you too sleepy to notice. Oh, you sons of females I wouldn’t soil my lips by naming! Well, back you go to hunt it up, that’s all!”

  “By Allah and the tomb of his Prophet, you wrong us unpardonably. There was nothing left at the oasis, nor yet dropped off on the way back. It was not there, and that is the truth in its purity.”

  “Truth! Purity! You miserable lot of shirks and liars, you—and the gentleman here not touching a drop of anything but water—as you profess to do, you liquor-swilling humbugs!”

  Medford drew back from the parapet with a smile of relief. It was nothing but a case of Perrier—the missing case—which had raised the passions of these grown men to the pitch of frenzy! The anti-climax lifted a load from his breast. If Gosling, the calm and self-controlled, could waste his wrath on so slight a hitch in the working of the commissariat, he at least must have a free mind. How absurd this homely incident made Medford’s speculations seem!

  He was at once touched by Gosling’s solicitude, and annoyed that he should have been so duped by the hallucinating fancies of the East.

  Almodham was off on his own business; very likely the men knew where and what the business was; and even if they had robbed him in his absence, and quarrelled over the spoils, Medford did not see what he could do. It might even be that his eccentric host—with whom, after all, he had had but one evening’s acquaintance—repenting of an invitation too rashly given, had ridden away to escape the boredom of entertaining him. As this alternative occurred to Medford it seemed so plausible that he began to wonder if Almodham had not simply withdrawn to some secret suite of that intricate dwelling, and were waiting there for his guest’s departure.

  So well would this explain Gosling’s solicitude to see the visitor off—so completely account for the man’s nervous and contradictory behaviour—that Medford, smiling at his own obtuseness, hastily resolved to leave on the morrow. Tranquillized by this decision, he lingered about the court till dusk fell, and then, as usual, went up to the roof. But today his eyes, instead of raking the horizon, fastened on the clustering edifice of which, after six days’ residence, he knew so little. Aerial chambers, jutting out at capricious angles, baffled him with closely shuttered windows, or here and there with the enigma of painted panes. Behind which window was his host concealed, spying, it might be, at this very moment on the movements of his lingering guest?

  The idea that that strange moody man, with his long brown face and shock of white hair, his half-guessed selfishness and tyranny, and his morbid self-absorption, might be actually within a stone’s throw, gave Medford, for the first time, a sharp sense of isolation. He felt himself shut out, unwanted—the place, now that he imagined someone might be living in it unknown to him, became lonely, inhospitable, dangerous.

  “Fool that I am—he probably expected me to pack up and go as soon as I found he was away!” the young man reflected. Yes; decidedly, he would leave the next morning.

  Gosling had not shown himself all the afternoon. When at length, belatedly, he came to set the table, he wore a look of sullen, almost surly, reserve which Medford had not yet seen on his face. He hardly returned the young man’s friendly “Hallo—dinner?” and when Medford was seated handed him the first dish in silence. Medford’s glass remained unfilled till he touched its brim.

  “Oh, there’s nothing to drink, sir. The men lost the case of Perrier—or dropped it and smashed the bottles. They say it never came. ’Ow do I know, when they never open their ’eathen lips but to lie?” Gosling burst out with sudden violence.

  He set down the dish he was handing, and Medford saw that he had been obliged to do so because his whole body was shaking as if with fever.

  “My dear man, what does it matter? You’re going to be ill,” Medford exclaimed, laying his hand on the servant’s arm. But the latter, muttering: “Oh, God, if I’d only ’a’ gone for it myself,” jerked away and vanished from the room.

  Medford sat pondering; it certainly looked as if poor Gosling were on the edge of a break-down. No wonder, when Medford himself was so oppressed by the uncanniness of the place. Gosling reappeared after an interval, correct, close-lipped, with the dessert and a bottle of white wine. “Sorry, sir.”

  To pacify him, Medford sipped the wine and then pushed his chair away and returned to the court. He was making for the fig tree by the well when Gosling, slipping ahead, transferred his chair and wicker table to the other end of the court.

  “You’ll be better here—there’ll be a breeze presently,” he said. “I’ll fetch your coffee.”

  He disappeared again, and Medford sat gazing up at the pile of masonry and plaster, and wondering whether he had not been moved away from his favourite corner to get him out of—or into?—the angle of vision of the invisible watcher. Gosling, having brought the coffee, went away and Medford sat on.

  At length he rose and began to pace up and down as he smoked. The moon was not yet up, and darkness fell solemnly on the ancient walls. Presently the breeze arose and began its secret commerce with the palms.

  Medford went back to his seat; but as soon as he had resumed it he fancied that the gaze of his hidden watcher was jealously fixed on the red spark of his cigar. The sensation became increasingly distasteful; he could almost feel Almodham reaching out long ghostly arms from somewhere above him in the darkness. He moved back into the living-room, where a shaded light hung from the ceiling; but the room was airless, and finally he went out again and dragged his seat to its old place under the fig tree. From there the windows which he suspected could not command him, and he felt easier, though the corner was out of the breeze and the heavy air seemed tainted with the exhalation of the adjoining well.

  “The water must be very low,” Medford mused. The smell, though faint, was unpleasant; it smirched the purity of the night. But he felt safer there, somehow, farther from those unseen eyes which seemed mysteriously to have become his enemies.

  “If one of the men had knifed me in the desert, I shouldn’t wonder if it would have been at Almodham’s orders,” Medford thought. He drowsed.

  When he woke the moon was pushing up its ponderous orange disk above the walls, and the darkness in the court was less dense. He must have slept for an hour or more. The night was delicious, or would have been anywhere but there. Medford felt a shiver of his old fever and remembered that Gosling had warned him that the court was unhealthy at night.

  “On account of the well, I suppose. I’ve been sitting too close to it,” he reflected. His head ached, and he fancied that the sweetish foulish smell clung to his face as it had after his bath. He stood up and approached the well to see how much water was left in it. But the moon was not yet high enough to light those depths, and he peered down into blackness.

  Suddenly he felt both shoulders gripped from behind and forcibly pressed forward, as if by someone seeking to push him over the edge. An instant later, almost coinciding with his own swift resistance, the push became a strong tug backward, and he swung round to confront Gosling, whose hands immediately dropped from his shoulders.

  “I thought you had the fever, sir—I seemed to see you pitching over,” the man stammered.

  Medford’s wits returned. “We must both have it, for I fancied you were pitching me,” he said with a laugh.

  “Me, sir?” Gosling gasped. “I pulled you back as ’ard as ever—”

  “Of course. I know.”

  “Whatever are you doing here, anyhow, sir? I warned you it was un’ealthy at night,” Gosling continued irritably.

  Medford leaned against the well-head and contemplated him. “I believe the whole place is unhealthy.”

  Gosling was silent. At length he asked: “Aren’t you going up to bed, sir?”

  “No,” said Medford, “I prefer to stay here.”

  Gosling’s face took on an expression of dogged anger. “Well, then, I prefer that you shouldn’t.”

  Medford laughed again. “Why? Because it’s the hour when Mr. Almodham comes out to take the air?”

  The effect of this question was unexpected. Gosling dropped back a step or two and flung up his hands, pressing them to his lips as if to stifle a low outcry.

  “What’s the matter?” Medford queried. The man’s antics were beginning to get on his nerves.

  “Matter?” Gosling still stood way from him, out of the rising slant of moonlight.

  “Come! Own up that he’s here and have done with it!” cried Medford impatiently.

  “Here? What do you mean by ‘here’? You ’aven’t seen ’im, ’ave you?” Before the words were out of the man’s lips he flung up his arms again, stumbled forward and fell in a heap at Medford’s feet.

  Medford, still leaning against the well-head, smiled down contemptuously at the stricken wretch. His conjecture had been the right one, then; he had not been Gosling’s dupe after all.

  “Get up, man. Don’t be a fool! It’s not your fault if I guessed that Mr. Almodham walks here at night—”

  “Walks here!” wailed the other, still cowering.

  “Well, doesn’t he? He won’t kill you for owning up, will he?”

  “Kill me? Kill me? I wish I’d killed you!” Gosling half got to his feet, his head thrown back in ashen terror. “And I might ’ave, too, so easy! You felt me pushing of you over, didn’t you? Coming ’ere spying and sniffing—” His anguish seemed to choke him.

  Medford had not changed his position. The very abjectness of the creature at his feet gave him an easy sense of power. But Gosling’s last cry had suddenly deflected the course of his speculations. Almodham was here, then; that was certain; but just where was he, and in what shape? A new fear scuttled down Medford’s spine.

  “So you did want to push me over?” he said. “Why? As the quickest way of joining your master?”

  The effect was more immediate than he had foreseen.

  Gosling, getting to his feet, stood there bowed and shrunken in the accusing moonlight.

  “Oh, God—and I ’ad you ’arf over! You know I did! And then—it was what you said about Wembley. So help me, sir, I felt you meant it, and it ’eld me back.” The man’s face was again wet with tears, but this time Medford recoiled from them as if they had been drops splashed up by a falling body from the foul waters below.

  Medford was silent. He did not know if Gosling were armed or not, but he was no longer afraid; only aghast, and yet shudderingly lucid.

  Gosling continued to ramble on half deliriously:

  “And if only that Perrier ’ad of come. I don’t believe it’d ever ’ave crossed your mind, if only you’d ’ave had your Perrier regular, now would it? But you say ’e walks—and I knew he would! Only—what I was to do with him, with you turning up like that the very day?”

  Still Medford did not move.

  “And ’im driving me to madness, sir, sheer madness, that same morning. Will you believe it? The very week before you come, I was to sail for England and ’ave my ’oliday, a ’ole month, sir—and I was entitled to six, if there was any justice—a ’ole month in ’Ammersmith, sir, in a cousin’s ’ouse, and the chance to see Wembley thoroughly; and then ’e ’eard you was coming, sir, and ’e was bored and lonely ’ere, you understand—’e ’ad to have new excitements provided for ’im or ’e’d go off ’is bat—and when ’e ’eard you were coming, ’e come out of his black mood in a flash and was ’arf crazy with pleasure, and said: ‘I’ll keep ’im ’ere all winter—a remarkable young man, Gosling—just my kind.’ And when I says to him: ‘And ’ow about my ’oliday?’ he stares at me with those stony eyes of ’is and says: ‘’Oliday? Oh, to be sure; why, next year—we’ll see what can be done about it next year.’ Next year, sir, as if ’e was doing me a favour! And that’s the way it ’ad been for nigh on twelve years.

  “But this time, if you ’adn’t ’ave come I do believe I’d ’ave got away, for he was getting used to ’aving Selim about ’im and his ’ealth was never better—and, well, I told ’im as much, and ’ow a man ’ad his rights after all, and my youth was going, and me that ’ad served him so well chained up ’ere like ’is watch-dog, and always next year and next year—and, well, sir, ’e just laughed, sneering-like, and lit ’is cigarette, ‘Oh, Gosling, cut it out,’ ’e says.

  “He was standing on the very spot where you are now, sir; and he turned to walk into the ’ouse. And it was then I ’it ’im. He was a heavy man, and he fell against the well kerb. And just when you were expected any minute—oh, my God!”

  Gosling’s voice died out in a strangled murmur.

  Medford, at his last words, had involuntarily shrunk back a few feet. The two men stood in the middle of the court and stared at each other without speaking. The moon, swinging high above the battlements, sent a searching spear of light down into the guilty darkness of the well.

  *The famous exhibition at Wembley, near London, in 1924.

 

 

  Edith Wharton, Ghosts

 

 

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