Chapter III: Part 3

Upcher was not particularly glad to see me, but he made the situation as little strained as possible. He did no violent protesting, no arraigning of law and justice. If he had, perhaps, acted according to the dictates of his hypothetical ancestress, he at least spoke calmly enough. He seemed to regard himself less as unjustly accused than as unjustly executed, if I may say so: he looked on himself as a dead man; his calamity was irretrievable. The dead may judge, but I fancy they don’t shriek. At all events, Upcher didn’t. A proof of his having cast hope carelessly over his shoulder was his way of speaking of his wife. He didn’t even take the trouble to use the present tense; to stress, as it were, her flesh-and-blood reality. It was “Rachel was,” never “Rachel is”--as we sometimes use the past tense to indicate that people have gone out of our lives by their own fault. The way in which he spoke of her was not tactful. A franker note of hatred I’ve never--except perhaps once--heard struck. Occasionally he would pull himself up, as if he remembered that the dead are our natural creditors for kindly speech.

“She was a devil, and only a devil could live with her. But there’s no point in going into it now.”

I rather wanted him to go into it: not--might Heaven forbid!--to confess, but to justify himself, to gild his stained image. I tried frankness.

“I think I’ll tell you, Upcher, that I never liked her.”

He nodded. “She was poison; and I am poisoned. That’s the whole thing.”

I was silent for a moment. How much might it mean?

“You read the evidence?” he broke out. “Well, it was bad--damned bad and dirty. I’d rather be hanged straight than hear it all again. But it’s the kind of thing you get dragged into sooner or later if you link yourself to a creature like that. I suppose I’m essentially vulgar, but I’m a better lot than she was--for all her looks.”

“She had looks,” I admitted.

“No one could touch her at her best. But she was an unspeakable cat.”

It had been, all of it, about as much as I could stand, and I prepared to go. My time, in any case, was about up. I found it--in spite of the evidence--shockingly hard to say good-bye to Upcher. You know what farewells by a peaceful death-bed are; and you can imagine this.

There was nothing to do but grip his hand. “Good-bye, Filippo.”

“Good-bye, old man. I’ll see you--” The familiar phrase was extinguished on his lips. We stared at each other helplessly for an instant. Then the warder led me out.

The Upcher trial--since Filippo refused to appeal--had blown over a bit by the time I went West. My widowed sister was ill, and I left Evie and every one, to take her to southern California. We followed the conventional route of flight from tuberculosis, and lingered a little in Arizona, looking down into the unspeakable depths of the Grand Cañon. I rather hoped Letitia would stay there, for I’ve never seen anything else so good; but the unspeakable depths spoke to her words of terror. She wanted southern California: roses, and palms, and more people. It was before the Santa Fé ran its line up to Bright Angel, and of course El Tovar wasn’t built. It was rather rough living. Besides, there were Navajos and Hopis all about, and Letitia came of good Abolitionist stock and couldn’t stand anything that wasn’t white. So we went on to Santa Barbara.

There we took a house with a garden; rode daily down to the Pacific, and watched the great blue horizon waves roll ever westward to the immemorial East. “China’s just across, and that is why it looks so different from the Atlantic,” I used to explain to Letitia; but she was never disloyal to the North Shore of Massachusetts. She liked the rose-pink mountains, and even the romantic Mission of the Scarlet Woman; but she liked best her whist with gentle, white-shawled ladies, and the really intellectual conversations she had with certain college professors from the East. I could not get her to take ship for Hawaii or Samoa. She distrusted the Pacific. After all, China _was_ just across.

I grew rather bored, myself, by Santa Barbara, before the winter was out. Something more exotic, too, would have been good for Letitia. There was a little colony from my sister’s Holy Land, and in the evenings you could fancy yourself on Brattle Street. She had managed, even there, to befog herself in a New England atmosphere. I was sure it was bad for her throat. I won’t deny, either, that there was more than anxiety at the heart of my impatience. I could not get Filippo Upcher out of my head. After all, I had once seen much of him; and, even more than that, I had seen him act a hundred times. Any one who had seen him do Macbeth would know that Filippo Upcher could not commit a murder without afterthoughts, however little forethought there might have been in it. It was all very well for van Vreck to speculate on Filippo’s ancestry and suggest that the murder was a pretty case of atavism--holding the notion up to the light with his claret and smiling æsthetically. Upcher had had a father of sorts, and he wasn’t all Borgia--or housemaid. Evie never smirched her charming pages with the name of Upcher, and I was cut off from the _Orb_; but I felt sure that the San Francisco papers would announce the date of his execution in good time. I scanned them with positive fever. Nothing could rid me of the fantastic notion that there would be a terrible scene for Upcher on the other side of the grave; that death would but release him to Rachel Upcher’s Stygian fury. It seemed odd that he should not have preferred a disgusted jury to such a ghost before its ire was spent. The thought haunted me; and there was no one in Letitia’s so satisfactory circle to whom I could speak. I began to want the open; for the first time in my life, to desire the sound of unmodulated voices. Besides, Letitia’s régime was silly. I took drastic measures.

It was before the blessed days of limousines, and one had to arrange a driving trip with care. Letitia behaved very well. She was really worried about her throat, and absurdly grateful to me for giving up my winter to it. I planned as comfortably as I could for her--even suggested that we should ask an acquaintance or two to join us. She preferred going alone with me, however, and I was glad. Just before we started, while I was still wrangling with would-be guides and drivers and sellers of horses, the news of Upcher’s execution came. If I could have suppressed that day’s newspapers in Santa Barbara, I should have done so, for, little as I had liked Filippo, I liked less hearing the comments of Letitia’s friends. They discussed the case, criminologically, through an interesting evening. It was quite scientific and intolerably silly. I hurried negotiations for the trip, and bought a horse or two rather recklessly. Anything, I felt, to get off. We drove away from the hotel, waving our hands to a trim group (just photographed) on the porch.

The days that followed soothed me: wild and golden and increasingly lonely. We had a sort of cooking kit with us, which freed us from too detailed a schedule, and could have camped, after a fashion; but usually by sundown we made some rough tavern or other. Letitia looked askance at these, and I did not blame her. As we struck deeper in toward the mountains, the taverns disappeared, and we found in their stead lost ranches--self-sufficing, you would say, until, in the parched faces of the womenfolk, all pretence of sufficiency broke down. Letitia picked up geological specimens and was in every way admirable, but I did not wish to give her an overdose. After a little less than a fortnight, I decided to start back to Santa Barbara. We were to avoid travelling the same country twice, and our route, mapped, would eventually be a kind of rough ellipse. We had just swung round the narrow end, you might say, when our first real accident occurred. The heat had been very great, and our driver had, I suspect, drunk too much. At all events, he had not watched his horses as he should have done, and one of the poor beasts, in the mid-afternoon, fell into a desperate state with colic. We did what we could--he nearly as stupid as I over it--but it was clear that we could not go on that night whither we had intended. It was a question of finding shelter, and help for the suffering animal. The sky looked threatening. I despatched the inadequate driver in search of a refuge, and set myself to impart hope to Letitia. The man returned in a surprisingly short time, having seen the outbuildings of a ranch-house. I need not dwell on details. We made shift to get there eventually, poor collapsed beast and all. A ranchman of sorts met us and conducted Letitia to the house. The ranch belonged, he said, to a Mrs. Wace, and to Mrs. Wace, presumably, he gave her in charge. I did not, at the moment, wish to leave our horse until I saw into what hands I was resigning him. The hands seemed competent enough, and the men assured me that the animal could travel the next day. When the young man returned from the ranch-house, I was quite ready to follow him back thither, and get news of Letitia. He left me inside a big living-room. A Chinese servant appeared presently and contrived to make me understand that Mrs. Wace would come down when she had looked after my sister. I was still thinking about the horse when I heard the rustle of skirts. Our hostess had evidently established Letitia. I turned, with I know not what beginnings of apologetic or humorous explanation on my lips. The beginning was the end, for I stood face to face with Rachel Upcher.

I have never known just how the next moments went. She recognized me instantly, and evidently to her dismay. I know that before I could shape my lips to any words that should be spoken, she had had time to sit down and to suggest, by some motion of her hand, that I should do the same. I did not sit; I stood before her. It was only when she began some phrase of conventional surprise at seeing me in that place of all places that I found speech. I made nothing of it; I had no solution; yet my message seemed too urgent for delay. All that I had suffered in my so faint connection with Filippo Upcher’s tragedy returned to me in one envenomed pang. I fear that I wanted most, at the moment, to pass that pang on to the woman before me. My old impatience of her type, her cheap mysteriousness, her purposeless inscrutability possessed me. I do not defend my mood; I only give it to you as it was. I have often noticed that crucial moments are appallingly simple to live through. The brain constructs the labyrinth afterwards. All perplexities were merged for me just then in that one desire--to speak, to wound her. But my task was not easy, and I have never been proud of the fashion of its performance.

“Mrs. Wace” (even the subtle van Vreck could not have explained why I did not give her her own name), “is it possible--but I pray Heaven it is--that you don’t know?”

“Know?” It was the voice of a stone sphinx.

“How can I tell you--how can I tell you?”

“What?”

“About Filippo.”

“Filippo?”

“Yes, Filippo! That he is dead.”

“Dead?” The carved monosyllables were maddening.

“Yes--killed. Tried, sentenced, _executed_.”

Her left hand dropped limply from the lace at her throat to a ruffle of her dress. “For what?” Her voice vibrated for the first time.

“For murdering you.”

“Me?” She seemed unable to take it in.

“You must have seen the papers.”

“I have seen no papers. Does one leave the world as utterly as I have left it, to read newspapers? On a lonely ranch like this”--she broke off. “I haven’t so much as seen one for five months. I--I--” Then she pulled herself together. “Tell me. This is some horrid farce. What do you mean? For God’s sake, man, tell me!”

She sat back to hear.

I cannot remember the words in which I told her. I sketched the thing for her--the original mystery, breaking out at last into open scandal when the dismembered body was found; the evidence (such of it as I could bring myself to utter in the presence of that so implicated figure); the course of the trial; Filippo’s wretched defence; the verdict; the horrid, inevitable result. My bitterness grew with the story, but I held myself resolutely to a tone of pity. After all--it shot across my mind--Filippo Upcher had perhaps in the grave found peace.

It must have taken me, for my broken, difficult account, half an hour. Not once in that time was I interrupted. She seemed hardly to breathe. I told her to the very date and hour of his execution. I could give her no comfort; only, at best, bald facts. For what exhibition of self-loathing or self-pity I had been prepared I do not know; but surely for some. I had been bracing myself throughout for any kind of scene. No scene of any kind occurred. She was hard and mute as stone. I could have dealt better, when at last I stopped, with hysterics than with that figure before me--tense, exhausted, terrible. I found myself praying for her tears. But none came.

At last I rose--hoping by the sudden gesture to break her trance. Her eyes followed me. “Terrible--terrible--beyond anything I ever dreamed.” I caught the whispered words. I took the chance for pity; found myself--though I detested the woman as never before--wanting to comfort her.

“He never appealed,” I reminded her. “Perhaps he was glad to die.” It sounded weak and strange; but who could tell what words would reach that weak, strange heart?

I stood before her, more perplexed than at any other moment of my life. At last she opened her eyes and spoke. “Leave me. And do not tell your sister who I am. I shall pull myself together by dinnertime. Go!” She just lifted her hand, then closed her eyes again.

I went out, and, stumbling across a Chinese servant, got him to show me my room.

Of what use would it be to recall, after all the years, what I felt and thought during the next hours? I did not try to send Letitia to Mrs. Upcher. Letitia would have been of no use, even if she had consented to go. It was sheerest wisdom to obey Rachel Upcher, and not to tell. But I had a spasm of real terror when I thought of her “pulling herself together” in her lonely chamber. I listened for a scream, a pistol-shot. It did not seem to me that a woman could hear news like that which it had been my tragic luck to give, without some according show of emotion. Yet a little later I asked myself in good faith what show could ever fit that situation. What speech, what gesture, in that hour, would have been adequate? The dangerous days, in point of fact, would probably come later. I thought more of her, in those two hours, than of Filippo. Though she might well, from all the evidence, have hated him quite honestly, hers was the ironic destiny that is harder to bear than mere martyrdom. No death had ever been more accidental, more irrelevant, more preventable than Filippo’s. One fortnight sooner, she could have turned back the wheel that had now come full circle. That was to be her Hell, and--well, having descended into it in those two hours, I was glad enough to mount once more into the free air.

Mrs. Upcher kept her promise. She pulled herself together and came to dinner, in a high black dress without so much as a white ruche to relieve it. The manager of the ranch, a young Englishman named Floyd, dined with us. He was handsome in a bloodshot way, and a detrimental, if ever there has been one. In love with Mrs. Upcher he looked to be; that, too, in the same bloodshot way. But she clearly had him in perfect order. The mask, I suppose, had worked. Letitia did her social best, but her informing talk failed to produce any pleasant effect. It was too neat and flat. Floyd watched Mrs. Upcher, and she watched the opposite wall. I did my best to watch no one. We were rather like a fortuitous group at a provincial _table d’hôte_: dissatisfied with conditions and determined not to make acquaintance. We were all thankful, I should think, when the meal was over. Mrs. Upcher made no attempt to amuse us or make us comfortable. The young manager left for his own quarters immediately after dinner, and Letitia soon went to her room. I lingered for a moment, out of decency, thinking Rachel Upcher might want to speak to me, to ask me something, to cry out to me, to clutch me for some desperate end. She sat absolutely silent for five minutes; and, seeing that the spell, whatever it was, was not yet broken, I left her.

I did not go to bed at once. How should I have done that? I was still listening for that scream, that pistol-shot. Nothing came. I remember that, after an hour, I found it all receding from me--the Upchers’ crossed emotions and perverted fates. It was like stepping out of a miasmic mist. Filippo Upcher was dead; and on the other side of the grave there had been no such encounter for him as I had imagined. And I had positively seen a demoniac Rachel Upcher waiting for him on that pale verge! I searched the room for books. There was some Ibsen, which at that moment I did not want. I rejected, one after one, nearly all the volumes that the shelves held. It was a stupid collection. I had about made up my mind to the “Idylls of the King” (they were different enough, in all conscience, from the Upcher case) when I saw a pile of magazines on a table in a distant corner. “Something sentimental,” I proposed to myself, as I went over to ravage them. Underneath the magazines--a scattered lot, for the most part, of _London Graphics_ and _English Illustrateds_--I found a serried pack of newspapers: San Francisco and Denver sheets, running a few months back. I had never seen a Denver newspaper, and I picked one up to read the editorials, out of a desultory curiosity rare with me. On the first page, black head-lines took a familiar contour. I had stumbled on the charwoman’s evidence against Filippo Upcher. _Rien que ça!_

My first feeling, I remember, was one of impotent anger--the child’s raving at the rain--that I must spend the night in that house. It was preposterous that life should ask it of me. Talk of white nights! What, pray, would be the color of mine? Then I, in my turn, “pulled myself together.” I went back to the newspapers and examined them all. The little file was arranged in chronological order and was coextensive with the Upcher case, from arrest to announcement of the execution. The _Orb_ might have been a little fuller, but not much. The West had not been fickle to Filippo.

I sat staring at the neatly folded papers for a time. They seemed to me monstrous, not fit to touch, as if they were by no means innocent of Filippo Upcher’s fate. By a trick of nerves and weak lamplight, there seemed to be nothing else in the room. I was alone in the world with them. How long I sat there, fixing them with eyes that must have shown clear loathing, I have never known. There are moments like that, which contrive cunningly to exist outside of Time and Space, of which you remember only the quality. But I know that when I heard steps in the corridor, I was sure for an instant that it was Filippo Upcher returning. I was too overwrought to reflect that, whatever the perils of Rachel Upcher’s house might be, the intrusion of the dead Filippo was not one of them: that he would profit resolutely by the last league of those fortunate distances--if so it chanced, by the immunity of very Hell. It could not be Filippo’s hand that knocked so nervously on the door. Nor was it. I opened to Rachel Upcher. The first glance at her face, her eyes, her aimless, feverish, clutching hands, showed that the spell had at last been broken. She had taken off her black dress and was wrapped in loose, floating, waving pink. Have you ever imagined the Erinyes in pink? No other conceivable vision suggests the figure that stood before me. I remember wondering foolishly and irrelevantly why, if she could look like that, she had not done Ibsen better. But she brought me back to fact as she beckoned me out of the room.

“I am sorry--very sorry--but--I was busy with your sister when you came in, and they have given you the wrong room. I will send some one to move your things--I will show you your room. Please come--I am sorry.”

I cannot describe her voice. The words came out with difficult, unnatural haste, like blood from a wound. Between them she clutched at this or that shred of lace. But I could deal better even with frenzy than with the mask that earlier I had so little contrived to disturb. I felt relieved, disburdened. And Filippo was safe--safe. I was free to deal as I would.

I stepped back into the room. The pile of papers no longer controlled my nerves. After all, they had been but the distant reek of the monster. I went over and lifted them, then faced her.

“Is this what you mean by the wrong room?”

She must have seen at once that I had examined them; that I had sounded the whole significance of their presence there. The one on top--I had not disturbed their order--gave in clear print the date fixed for Filippo Upcher’s execution: that date now a fortnight back. And she had played to me, as if I were a gallery god, with her black dress!

“I have looked them through,” I went on; “and though I didn’t need to read those columns, I know just what they contain. You knew it all.” I paused. It would have taken, it seemed to me, the vocabulary of a major prophet to denounce her fitly. I could only leave it at that bald hint of her baseness.

She made no attempt at denial or defence. Something happened in her face--something more like dissolution than like change--as if the elements of her old mask would never reassemble. She stepped forward, still gathering the floating ribands, the loose laces, in her nervous hands. Once she turned as if listening for a sound. Then she sat down beside my fire, her head bent forward toward me; ready, it seemed, to speak. Her fingers moved constantly, pulling, knotting, smoothing the trailing streamers of her gown. The rest of her body was as still as Filippo Upcher’s own. I endured her eyes for a moment. Then I repeated my accusation. “You knew it all.”

“Yes, I knew it all.”

I had not dreamed, in spite of the papers that I clutched in full view of her, that she would confess so simply. But they apparently brought speech to her lips. She did not go on at once, and when she did, she sounded curiously as Filippo Upcher in prison had sounded. Her voice touched him only with disgust. Yet she stinted no detail, and I had to hear of Filippo’s vices: his vanities, his indiscretions, his infidelities, all the seven deadly sins against her pride committed by him daily. He may have been only a bounder, but his punishment had been fit for one heroic in sin. I did my best to keep that discrepancy in mind as she went on vulgarizing him. I am no cross-questioner, and I let her account move, without interruption, to the strange, fluttering _tempo_ of her hands. Occasionally her voice found a vibrant note, but for the most part it was flat, impersonal as a phonograph: the voice of the actress who is not at home in the unstudied rôle. I do not think she gauged her effect; I am sure that she was given wholly to the task of describing her hideous attitude veraciously. There was no hint of appeal in her tone, as to some dim tribunal which I might represent; but she seemed, once started, to like to tell her story. It was not really a story--the patched portrait of a hatred, rather. Once or twice I opened my lips to cry out: “Why not, in Heaven’s name, a divorce rather than this?” I always shut them without asking, and before the end I understood. The two had simply hated each other too much. They could never be adequately divorced while both beheld the sun. To walk the same earth was too oppressive, too intimate a tie. It sounds incredible--even to me, now; but I believed it without difficulty at that moment. I remembered the firmness with which Filippo had declared that, herself poison, she had poisoned him. Well, there _were_ fangs beneath her tongue.

Heaven knows--it’s the one thing I don’t know about it, to this day--if there was any deliberate attempt on Rachel Upcher’s part to give her flight a suspicious look. There were so many ways, when once you knew for a fact that Filippo had not killed her, in which you could account for the details that earlier had seemed to point to foul play. My own notion is that she fled blindly, with no light in her eyes--no ghastly glimmer of catastrophe to come. She had covered her tracks completely because she had wished to be completely lost. She didn’t wish Filippo to have even the satisfaction of knowing whether she was alive or dead. Some of her dust-throwing--the unused ticket, for example--resulted in damning evidence against Filippo. After that, coincidence labored faithfully at his undoing. No one knows, even now, whose body it was that passed for Rachel Upcher’s. All other clues were abandoned at the time for the convincing one that led to her. I have sometimes wondered why I didn’t ask her more questions: to whom she had originally given the marked underclothing, for example. It might have gone far toward identifying what the Country Club grounds had so unluckily given up. But to lead those tortured fragments of bone and flesh into another masquerade would have been too grotesque. And at that moment, in the wavering, unholy lamplight of the half-bare, half-tawdry room--the whole not unlike one of Goya’s foregrounds--justice and the public were to me equally unreal. What I realized absolutely was that so long as Rachel Upcher lived, I might not speak. Horror that she was, she had somehow contrived to be the person who must be saved. I would have dragged her by the hair to the prison gates, had there been any chance of saving Filippo--at least, I hope I should. But Filippo seemed to me at the moment so entirely lucky that to avenge him didn’t matter. I think I felt, sitting opposite that Fury in pink, something of their own emotion. Filippo was happier, _tout bonnement_, in another world from her; and to do anything to bring them together--to hound her into suicide, for example--would be to play him a low trick. I could have drunk to her long life as she sat there before me. It matters little to most of us what the just ghosts think; how much less must our opinion matter to them! No; Rachel Upcher, even as I counted her spots and circles, was safe from me. I didn’t want to know anything definitely incriminating about her flight, anything that would bring her within the law, or impose on me a citizen’s duties. Citizens had already bungled the situation enough. If she had prepared the trap for Filippo, might that fact be forever unknown! But I really do not believe that she had. What she had done was to profit shamelessly (a weak word!) by coincidence. I have often wondered if Rachel Upcher never wavered, never shuddered, during those months of her wicked silence. That question I even put to her then, after a fashion. “It was long,” she answered; “but I should do it all again. He was horrible.” What can you do with hatred like that? He had been to her, as she to him, actual infection. “Poison ... and I am poisoned.” Filippo’s words to me would have served his wife’s turn perfectly. There was, in the conventional sense, for all her specific complaints, no “cause.” She hated him, not for what he did but for what he was. She _would_ have done it all again. The mere irony of her action would have been too much for some women; but Rachel Upcher had no ironic sense--only a natural and Ibsen-enhanced power of living and breathing among unspeakable emotions. And she plucked at those ribands, those laces, with the delicate, hovering fingers of a ghoul.

It is all so long ago that I could not, if I would, give you the exact words in which, at length, she made all this clear. Neither my mind nor my pen took any stenographic report of that conversation. I have given such phrases as I remember. The impression is there for life, however. Besides, there is no man who could not build up for himself any amount of literature out of that one naked fact: that Rachel Upcher knew her husband’s plight, and that she lay, mute, breathless, concealed, in her lair, lest she should, by word or gesture, save him. She took the whole trial, from accusation to sentence, for a piece of sublime, unmitigated luck--a beautiful blunder of Heaven’s in her behalf. That she thought of herself as guilty, I do not believe; only as--at last!--extremely fortunate. At least, as her tale went on, I heard less and less any accent of hesitation. She knew--oh, perfectly--how little any one else would agree with her. She was willing to beg my silence in any attitude of humility I chose to demand. But Rachel Upcher would never accuse herself. I asked no posturing of her. She got my promise easily enough. Can you imagine my going hotfoot to wake Letitia with the story? No more than that could I go to wake New York with it. Rachel Upcher, calmed by my solemn promise (though, if you’ll believe it, her own recital had already greatly calmed her), left me to seek repose. I watched her fluttering, sinister figure down the corridor, then came back to my infected room. She had not touched the pile of newspapers. I spent the night reading Ibsen; and in the morning managed so that we got off early. Mrs. Wace did not come down to breakfast, and I did not see her again. Young Floyd was in the devil of a temper, but his temper served admirably to facilitate our departure. He abandoned ranch affairs entirely to get us safely on our way. Our sick horse was in perfectly good condition, and would have given us no possible excuse for lingering. Letitia, out of sight of the ranch, delivered herself of a hesitating comment.

“Do you know, Richard, I have an idea that Mrs. Wace is not really a nice woman?”

I, too, had broken Mrs. Wace’s bread, but I did not hesitate. “I think you are undoubtedly right, Letitia.”

It was the only thing I have ever, until now, been able to do to avenge Filippo Upcher. Even when I learned (I always had an arrangement by which I should learn, if it occurred) of Mrs. Floyd’s death, I could still do nothing. There was poor Evie, who never knew, and who, as I say, could not have borne it.

I shall be much blamed by many people, no doubt, for having promised Rachel Upcher what she asked. I can only say that any one else, in my place, would have done the same. They were best kept apart: I don’t know how else to put it. I shall be blamed, too, for not seizing my late, my twelfth-hour opportunity to eulogize Filippo Upcher--for not, at least, trying to explain him. There would be no point in trying to account for what happened by characterizing Filippo. Nothing could account for such hatred: it was simply a great natural fact. They combined, like chemical agents, to that monstrous result. Each was, to the other, poison. I tell the truth now because no one has ever doubted Upcher’s guilt, and it is only common fairness that he should be cleared. Why should I, for that reason, weave flatteries about him? He did not murder his wife; but that fact has not made it any easier to call him “Filippo,” which I have faithfully done since I encountered Rachel Upcher in southern California. If truth is the order of the day, let me say the other thing that for years I have not been at liberty to say: he was a frightful bounder.

ON THE STAIRCASE

Probably the least wise way to begin a ghoststory is to say that one does not believe in ghosts. It suggests that one has never seen the real article. Perhaps, in one sense, I never have; yet I am tempted to set down a few facts that I have never turned over to the Society for Psychical Research or discussed at my club. The fact is that I had ingeniously forgotten them until I saw Harry Medway, the specialist--my old classmate--a few years ago. I say “forgotten”; of course, I had not forgotten them, but, in order to carry on the business of life, I had managed to record them, as it were, in sympathetic ink. After I heard what Harry Medway had to say, I took out the loose sheets and turned them to the fire. Then the writing came out strong and clear again--letter by letter, line by line, as fatefully as Belshazzar’s “immortal postscript.” Did I say that I do not believe in ghosts? Well--I am getting toward the end, and a few inconsistencies may be forgiven to one who is not far from discoveries that will certainly be inconsistent with much that we have learned by heart in this interesting world. Perhaps it will be pardoned me as a last flicker of moribund pride if I say that in my younger days I was a crack shot, and to the best of my belief never refused a bet or a drink or an adventure. I do not remember ever having been afraid of a human being; and yet I have known fear. There are weeks, still, when I live in a bath of it. I think I will amend my first statement, and say instead that I do not believe in any ghosts except my own--oh, and in Wender’s and Lithway’s, of course.

Some people still remember Lithway for the sake of his charm. He never achieved anything, so far as I know, except his own delightful personality. He was a classmate of mine, and we saw a great deal of each other both in and after college--until he married, indeed. His marriage coincided with my own appointment to a small diplomatic post in the East; and by the time that I had served my apprenticeship, come into my property, resigned from the service, and returned to America, Lithway’s wife had suddenly and tragically died. I had never seen her but once--on her wedding-day--but I had reason to believe that Lithway had every right to be as inconsolable as he was. If he had ever had any ambition in his own profession, which was law, he lost it all when he lost her. He retired to the suburban country, where he bought a new house that had just been put up. He was its first tenant, I remember. That fact, later, grew to seem important. There he relapsed into a semi-populated solitude, with a few visitors, a great many books, and an inordinate amount of tobacco. These details I gathered from Wender in town, while I was adjusting my affairs.

Never had an inheritance come so pat as mine. There were all sorts of places I wanted to go to, and now I had money enough to do it. The _wanderlust_ had nearly eaten my heart out during the years when I had kicked my heels in that third-rate legation. I wanted to see Lithway, but a dozen minor catastrophes prevented us from meeting during those breathless weeks, and as soon as I could I positively had to be off. Youth is like that. So that, although Lithway’s bereavement had been very recent, at the time when I was in America settling my affairs and drawing the first instalment of my beautiful income--there is no beauty like that of unearned increment--I did not see him until he had been a widower for more than two years.

The first times I visited Lithway were near together. I had begun what was to be my almost life-long holiday by spending two months alone--save for servants--on a house-boat in the Vale of Cashmere; and my next flights were very short. When I came back from those, I rested on level wing at Braythe. Lithway was a little bothered, on one of these occasions, about the will of a cousin who had died in Germany, leaving an orphan daughter, a child of six or seven. His conscience troubled him sometimes, and occasionally he said he ought to go over and see that the child’s inheritance was properly administered. But there was an aunt--a mother’s sister--to look after the child, and her letters indicated that there was plenty of money and a good lawyer to look after the investments. Since his wife’s death, Lithway had sunk into lethargy. He had enough to live on, and he drew out of business entirely, putting everything he had into government bonds. When he hadn’t energy enough left to cut off coupons, he said, he should know that it was time for him to commit suicide. He really spoke as if he thought that final indolence might arrive any day. I read the aunt’s letters. She seemed to be a good sort, and the pages reeked of luxury and the maternal instinct. I rather thought it would be a good excuse to get Lithway out of his rut, and advised him to go; but, when he seemed so unwilling, I couldn’t conscientiously say I thought the duty imperative. I had long ago exhausted Germany--I had no instinct to accompany him.

Lithway, then, was perfectly idle. His complete lack of the executive gift made him an incomparable host. He had been in the house three years, and I was visiting him there for perhaps the third time, when he told me that it was haunted. He didn’t seem inclined to give details, and, above all, didn’t seem inclined to be worried. He sat up very late always, and preferably alone, a fact that in itself proved that he was not nervous. As I said, I had never been interested in ghosts, and the newness of the house robbed fear of all seriousness. Ghosts batten on legend and decay. There wasn’t any legend, and the house was almost shockingly clean. When he told me of the ghost, then, I forbore to ask for any more information than he, of his own volition, gave me. If he had wanted advice or assistance, he would, of course, have said so. The servants seemed utterly unaware of anything queer, and servants leave a haunted house as rats a sinking ship. It really did not seem worth inquiring into. I referred occasionally to Lithway’s ghost as I might have done to a Syracusan coin which I should know him proud to possess but loath to show.

On my return from Yucatan, one early spring, Lithway welcomed me as usual. He seemed lazier than ever, and I noticed that he had moved his books down from a second-story to a ground-floor room. He slept outdoors summer and winter, and he had an outside stairway built to lead from his library up to the sleeping-porch. A door from the sleeping-porch led straight into his dressing-room. I laughed at his arrangements a little.

“You live on this side of the house entirely now--cut off, actually, from the other side. What is the matter with the east?”

He pointed out to me that the dining-room and the billiard-room were on the eastern side and that he never shunned them. “It’s just a notion,” he said. “Mrs. Jayne” (the housekeeper) “sleeps on the second floor, and I don’t like to wake her when I go up at three in the morning. She is a light sleeper.”

I laughed outright. “Lithway, you’re getting to be an old maid.”

It was natural that I should dispose my effects in the rooms least likely to be used by Lithway. I took over his discarded up-stairs study, and, with a bedroom next door, was very comfortable. He assured me that he had no reason to suppose I should ever be disturbed in either room. Moving his own things, he said, had been purely a precautionary measure in behalf of Mrs. Jayne. Curiously enough, I was perfectly sure that his first statement was absolutely true and his second absolutely false. Only the first one, however, seemed to be really my affair. I could hardly complain.

Lithway did seem changed; but I have such an involuntary trick of comparing my rediscovered friends with the human beings I have most recently been seeing that I did not take the change too seriously. He was perfectly unlike the Yucatan Indians; but, on reflection, why shouldn’t he be, I asked myself. Probably he had always been just like that. I couldn’t prove that he hadn’t. Yet I did think there was something back of his listlessness other than mere prolonged grief for his wife. Occasionally, I confess, I thought about the ghost in this connection.

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

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

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

“She?”

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

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

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

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

“Look at yourself.”

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

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

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

“She? This was a man.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ve only seen her a few times.”

“Where?”

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

“What is she like?”

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

“Does she speak?”

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

“What time of day have you seen her?”

“About eleven in the morning.”

The clocks were then striking twelve.

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

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

“What race should you say he was?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It?” I asked.

“The one Wender saw.”

“Oh! Wender has seen one?”

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

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

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

“And what was it?”

“A big rattlesnake, coiled to strike.”

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

“It _did_ strike,” Lithway went on.

“Did he have a scar?”

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

“Then why did it worry him?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Of course we did.”

“Did you find it?”

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

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

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

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

“He saw it twice,” explained Lithway.

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

“No.”

“Then why should it make him nervous?”

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

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

“Wender has a theory,” Lithway said.

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

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

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

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

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

“Was Wender’s rattlesnake old-fashioned?”

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

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

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

“How often do you see her?”

“About once in six months.”

“And you’re not afraid?”

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

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

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

“In spite of her eyes?”

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

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

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

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

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

“No.”

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

“Wender’s theory is that--” he began.

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