The Best Short Stories of 1915

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He tried to concentrate his faculties on looking genial and at the same
time intelligent.

"It was just like me, Julia," he began, the ghost of cheerfulness on
his face. "I took the earliest sort of train, instead of the one I
telephoned you I'd take. You see, to have landed at night, after all
the years--think of it! And then to go walking around by myself, seeing
things crop suddenly up that I hadn't thought of since--well--scarcely
since I was born. No wonder I couldn't sleep. This morning, like a
stranded idiot, I got out at that little way-station of yours, and
realized for the first time that I didn't have a blessed idea where
you lived."

"Rockface is about as enormous as a biscuit. Anybody could have told
you."

"That's the strangest part of it," recollected Hastings. "You see, I
had a curious hunch about it; I felt a little forsaken. I was actually
surprised and irritated that somebody--I didn't know who--wasn't waiting
to meet me.

"There was something about the place, Julia," he gravely pursued, "made
me feel justified in thinking a hospitable welcome was due me ... Oh
I don't mean because you were here! But--well--the veil of sea-turn
that half-hid the buildings across the square made me feel the need of
some kind of greeting--I expected one!--right on the spot! Can you
understand? And--instead--the cold east wind blew round me as if I were
an outcast.

"I stole down the first crooked street I came to. I stared at the
house-fronts, at the little square panes of the sagging window-sashes,
at the dingy doors, with those short, steep flights of steps leading
down to the side-walks."

Julia sobered to a tentative frown. Jack's eyes were bigger than
usual, and he did look, notwithstanding the feverish flush on his
cheeks, rather fagged. How she had been counting the days for him
to come! It didn't seem possible that the visit which he had been
promising for so long to make her should have finally materialized.
Wasn't it really an indication,--she pondered while again happily she
sized up the situation,--if he took so much trouble for her, that he
did, after all, care more perhaps than she had sometimes thought? But
what an extraordinary meeting it had been! He had at once launched
forth on this extreme discourse. She sat back, and let her eyes rest
on him with amused tolerance, her smile attentively adjusted to suit
his mood; for her moment's anxiety vanished at further sight of his
strong, broad shoulders and the handsome appearance he made in her
favorite high-back chair, his firm hands grasping the arms of it.

"You've stayed away from America too long," she said carelessly; "Paris
is bad for you."

He leaned forward, his delicately modeled cheekbones emphasized by the
firelight, his hair becomingly awry.

"I _knew_ it would all be as it was," he went inspiredly on. "There was
a thick clump of hedge, cold and dreary in the mist, that awoke pictures
of a prison I used to dread the sight of when I was--I don't know how
old. Once I partly thought I must be dreaming; so I put out my hand and
touched the wet, sodden picket of an old fence. I looked suspiciously
behind me. But there was only an old man behind, fully two hundred yards
away. Then the idea came to me that it would be a relief to talk to
somebody; I hadn't interchanged a word with any one since I got off the
ship. All kinds of impressions, you see, had been accumulating, and they
thronged like phantoms about me.

"I wanted to hear myself speak--to see if I could. So I turned, and
waited for him to come. The rain was dripping all around; there wasn't
another sound anywhere. Now, this is the queerest thing of all: what do
you think I said to him?" Jack leaned forward, his eyes darting
intensely over her face. "I said: 'Can you tell me the way to Mr.
Eberdeen's house?'"

"Mr.--_Eberdeen's_ house!" She stood abruptly up. "Who--who told you,"
she gasped, "that this was Mr. Eberdeen's house?"

He stood up, too, stepping back from her. "You must have told me," he
said, aware of his quivering lips, "in one of your letters. The name
came to me--"

"I never told you," she stated emphatically, "I never told any
one--for--for--why did you ask such a question of that old man?"

His gaze wandered.

"My throat felt parched from disuse. It took a distinct effort to make
the words sound articulate.

"'Sure, now,' answered the old man, while I was still puzzling to
explain to myself the question I had asked him, 'but never have I
heard it called _that_--not since my father died from the cold he
caught drivin' the mare up from Portsville. Ther' was a time, in the
days when they talked of it bein' ha'nted, you'd hear folks call it
Eberdeen Manor; but not--no, and my father likely's been dead these
forty years now--never, Mr. Eberdeen's house!"

"'Mr. Eberdeen--there was such a person, then?'

"'There'll be a time, me boy, when they'll doubt yerself was a living
thing.' He straightened his bent body reprehensibly; he shook his head.
'Walk back to the next corner,' he muttered, 'and turn to yer left.
It'll be down there ber the cliffs, if nobody's stolen it. Somebody'll
sure 'nough be there ter point it out to yer.'

"'I'm a stranger,' I apologized; 'I really didn't know.'

"'_Know!_' he shouted. 'Who was it owned the land this 'ere street
runs over? Who built it? Who was it paid fer the church on the hill?
Who did fer the sick, and gave to the poor, and got nothin' hisself
fer the trouble but grief and loneliness and a broken heart? Wher'
did yer come from?'

"And he surveyed me, as if the mere fact of his seeing me for the first
time made him doubt my intentions. Still I stood there waiting.

"'What was he like? What did he do? Who was he?' I couldn't help
flinging out in my wonderment.

"'As good's'll ever come back from wher' yer've been, or 'll pray fer
the like of yer, I reckon. Judge not, I tell yer, that yer be not
yerself judged.'

"I tried to smile at the old man.

"'Good-day to yer,' he grumbled, and walked back in the direction from
which he had come. I watched until he was lost in the thickness."

Julia looked at Hastings in astonishment. Just another glimmer of
anxiety crossed her mind; but any foolish worry she might have had for
him was merged in her consciousness of something indeed more staggering.

"Do you think," she brooded, "that it can be true--that--that the house
is--_was_--haunted?"

"I had," Jack unresponsively continued--"I couldn't help it--on the
way a queer loathing of the little village. The gaunt house-fronts
obtruded themselves so obstinately, so self-satisfiedly, like anemic
country parsons, with their eyes close together, giving me a mean,
soulless stare. Every object testified to its lack of any temperamental
share in the joy of living. The emptiness of the streets seemed
pitiless; their narrowness was oppressive."

"I love every inch of it," said Julia, defiantly.

Hastings was silent. He looked at the dry, colorless walls, covered with
circuitous lines of crackling old paint.

"Was this furniture here, Julia?" he asked.

"Not this," she exclaimed with pride.

"No wonder," he argued half to himself, "that the next generation
preferred black walnut, even with all its grapes and gewgaws! Horrible
as it was, it wasn't so orthodox and priggish and mirthless as what came
before."

He strayed out into the hall again; he viewed its stateliness, its
expurgated elegance. "Well, this has got me, Julia--seriously," he said
with a surprised realization that she was standing beside him.
"It's--it's immense."

"Oh, _that_," she cried out, "from _you_!" And slowly she stepped closer
to say something to him; but she thought better of it. "Don't you
think," she just let slip, "I've made it look at least--well--_old_?"

"As only a Westerner could want to make it look." His sense of humor
affectionately covered any lack of enthusiasm.

"Come, Jacky," she urged at last, "I'll show you all of it before lunch
is ready."

The stairs rose straight in the rear of the hall, directly opposite the
main entrance, with its border of finely traceried windows, branching
squarely to right and left two thirds of the way up. By the first door
above the side whither Julia conducted her guest she stepped fondly back
and announced:

"This, Jack, is your room. I hope you will like it."

"Yes," he murmured, distractedly gazing about him.

Despite the freshness of everything, despite the new woolen carpets,
with their correct geometric designs, ones Julia had had copied from
some battered relics which she had somehow acquired, despite the new
chintzes and the recently refinished furniture so deliberately assembled
there for the first time, despite the spickness and spanness of each
suitably collected detail of the room's decorations, a musty smell in
the air caught his breath. The floor swooped reminiscently down toward
the right; the boards of it made a stifled creak as he stepped across
them. He himself was a little unsteady. The window gave on impenetrable
fog. Hastings threw up the sash and peered out into the dampness; he
heard the sound of unseen boats groping their ways through the distance;
the water lapped and laved below him.

"Jack!" Julia called.

He turned to her, dazed, smiling in that way he had of trying to conceal
his consciousness of inattention.

"Of course, it seems plain and spare and--rather humble, after Europe. I
know _that_."

As if directed by her words, his eyes swept rapidly over the room.

"It's no use, Julia," he answered; "if you're New England to the core,
you can't get free of it. I'd like every drop of New England blood
drained out of me, and something--say Hebrew or--or Middle-West," he
laughed, "substituted in place of it. To you this is 'pretty' and 'cozy'
and--and 'cheerful'; to me--well, it's like an orgy of blue laws; it's
the personification of witch-lore--like self-inflicted penance for I
don't know what." He glanced at her in excitement, shifting his hands
uneasily in and out of his pockets.

"Yes," she said slowly. "I had thought, nevertheless, that you might
like it."

"Like it?" he echoed. "That's the trouble. I wish I weren't so full of
the meaning of it all. Can you fancy how a monk might feel, who'd been
away on a vacation, just getting back to his cell? _Like_ it? I can't
help liking it. It's my proper setting; I see that fast enough. But
I've come back to find how inexorable and harsh and catechismical it is,
and naturally I resent being what I am. Oh--" he broke off, suddenly
realizing the folly of his harangue, and after another moment he added:
"It's delightful, Julia dear, really. If only all the Westerners could
come to New England and revive it--and all the New-Englanders move West
and revive themselves!"

They went on from room to room.

"You Westerners," Hastings reiterated--"oh, I don't just know what the
difference is, for you're New England, too. Only you've got so much else
mixed up with it. You've become free-lances; your more recent, less
bigoted adventures have made you forget."

"What?" asked Julia, indignantly.

But he was at a loss, as he looked about him, to explain, however
much each new survey of the scene convinced him. "Here," he muttered,
"everything has been steeping so long in the attenuated resolutions
that drove us to come; everything is still conscientiously
soaked--saturated--in the barren memory of it."

"_You're_ not," said Julia, testily, to draw him out. "Precious little
of it _you've_ had! Two years at a school! You're more foreign than you
are New England. Remember--your--"

"Yes. I don't forget I've one foreign ancestor to boast of, and bless
Heaven for it! How my great-grandmother ever happened to marry--see
this!" Hastings went on, incoherently catching her arm and waving his
other over the exquisite array of her "colonial" chamber. "Now, this, to
you, is--well--it's as 'amusing' as if you'd tried to furnish a room to
imitate one in Cinderella's palace, as 'interesting' as if you'd done it
Louis Sixteenth, or--or--its meaning is hardly more personal to you than
the room you furnished in Munich that winter."--She blushed admiringly
at memory of their first meeting.--"The problem appealed to you, and you
made it charming. But to me--"

"You really hate it," said Julia, determined to face the facts.

"I really love it," he retorted sadly, "the way you couldn't help loving
a parent, even though you mightn't believe in him."

"Jack," she characteristically cried out to him again, "there is one
thing more that I hardly dare show you then. You'll think me such a
fool. I--"

A servant appeared to announce that luncheon was ready.

"Don't say anything to _them_ against it," she told him on the way down.

That wasn't, however, what made him silent during the meal. He took
little part in the conversation except when Mr. and Mrs. Elliott plied
him with questions, which he then found himself answering with only
unsatisfactory vagueness--answers that he could do nothing, not even
when Julia flew tenderly to his rescue, to make any better. Yes, he
liked the house, he said gravely. It was a nice old house. And he
thought how murky, despite its new coats of cleaning, was that far
corner up near the ceiling. No, he wasn't sorry, he responded, that he
had left the Ecole des Beaux Arts to devote all his time to painting; it
was the one thing he was suited for. Yes, his foreign great-grandfather
had been a portrait-painter. He couldn't remember what his name was.
Tremaine? Henry Tremaine. That was it. Julia was looking hard at him.
She was gazing down at her plate. He knew he had eaten nothing. He
could not eat. No, he wasn't at all hungry. Why was it so chilly? he
thought. Doubtless he had picked up a germ. The house, he muttered to
himself, was on his nerves. It was so everlastingly gloomy! Julia had
reinhabited it too authentically. "Eberdeen Manor"--"Mr. Eberdeen's
House." What names!

An hour afterward he told Julia he was dead sleepy and that, contrary
to all his habits, he was going up-stairs to take a nap. Dinner was
at seven? All right, he would be in better shape by then. He felt
wretchedly, but he didn't say so.

Out in the hall he paused a moment at the foot of the wide lower
staircase. The ticking of a good many clocks came to him from different
parts of the house; they seemed to focus their monotonous activity
especially on his hearing. Extraordinary recollections swept him. He
remembered having heard an old nurse, Sarah Teale, describe how her aunt
once rushed out the back door right in the midst of frying doughnuts,
and was instantly stricken with paralysis on account of it. There was
a low groaning; a moan floated to him from somewhere above. Bravely he
forced himself to climb the stairs toward it. He turned the knob. The
door stuck. He shook it again, and it yielded.

II

It was nearly dark when he awoke. A late, a very late, an unnaturally
late, afternoon dusk shadowed in streaks across the floor. He could
hardly breathe. The windows were close shut. The striped shades were
drawn down to the sills. But he could see the yellowed print of Da
Vinci's "Last Supper"--the one he had bought at Milan--hanging on the
panel above the empty hearth. There was the sand-shaker on his maple
desk. That old lithograph of the two kittens over beside the bureau was
crooked. He must remember to straighten it. The wall-paper was getting
dingy.

He stretched himself. A sharp pain was going through his head. But it
was late; he must get up and dress, or he wouldn't be ready in time.

The clothes he had just taken off lay across an arm of the painted
chair by his bed. He lifted the coat, and let it fall from his grasp.
He moved over to the wash-stand. The Chinese pitcher was as light as
if filled with air when he turned its nose to the basin. The hat-tub
stood on end between the wash-stand and the closet door. He reached
for the battered old red tassel of the bell-rope and pulled it. It
was so late,--it was getting later,--he must hurry, whether Simpkins
came or not. He could manage. And he opened the closet door, sighing
at the bothersome prospect of getting into his togs. He ran his hand
over his hair. Where was the mirror? And, damme! he had no light!

The shoes were a trifle hard to draw on, too small for him; the
breeches were badly in need of pressing; the coat was stiff. He began
opening drawers in the bureau, delving through piles of neatly folded
linen and silk. At last he chose a shirt and put it on over his head.
He laid aside the purple satin waistcoat until he should have arranged
his stock, which he found tight, and difficult to make meet in the back.
But he finally got it adjusted; he brought the thick, wide ends around
in front, tied them in a huge bow while he walked over to the window
and gazed out. Fine night. The mist had gone, the stars were dimly
appearing. He turned back for his waistcoat and jacket. By mistake he
opened the closet door again instead of the one which led into the hall.

"I knew you would come!" she said, approaching so near to him from
out the somber blackness of the garments which draped the walls that
he could see her quite plainly by the light of the candle in her hand.
She wasn't a day over twenty. If she was pale, it was more the pallor
of fright than of ill health, or perhaps only because her skin showed
so white, lighted by the faint glare, in contrast to her deep eyes and
to the thick, glossy braids bound round and round above her forehead.
"John, John, won't you speak to me?"

He took a step forward, faltering. At that moment there was a brusque
movement beside him, and he turned to behold there a young man, dressed
in knee-breeches, wearing a purple waistcoat and velvet coat, as like
unto himself as his own image.

"Duty bade me come," the stranger answered stiffly, as if it was for his
ears that her words had been intended.

Hastings' gaze flew to meet hers, which he was astonished to find still
directed on him instead of on the speaker. He felt himself melted to
pity by her frailness and beauty and charm, so that he turned almost
angrily toward the intruder, who, at that moment, however, began to
address her in tones Hastings could but admire:

"To you!" cried out the young stranger--"you, for whom duty knows no
promptings!"

At that, Hastings turned to her again, his heart rent by the plea she
uttered.

"But you love me? You love me? Oh, say it to me!" And she was looking
not at his counterpart; she was imploring _him_, she was stretching her
arms out to _him_, she was veritably making her plea to _him_, as if he
were the one who had elicited it.

"I will do anything for you--anything!" he would have promised her had
not the threat of the stranger so like unto himself interrupted.

"Don't mock my patience, Lydia," Hastings heard as once more he shifted
his eyes to the speaker.

It was maddening how from one to the other of them his sympathies
veered. The sepulchral voice of the man seemed to express Hastings'
own thoughts; yet her sweet appeal awoke resentful fury for what words
he dared say to her. If only Hastings might explain, when she stared
so reproachfully, that it was only he who had spoken!

Momentarily at a loss, she put the candle down on a little shelf. She
rubbed her hands one about the other as if her doing so might lessen
the affront which she had now somehow to meet. When at last she spoke,
her calm, even tones were like the loveliness of primroses; her eyes
were brimming with simple trustfulness.

"You own me, O my husband," she said, "heart--heart, body, and soul. Do
with me what you will."

Why should she be so abject? But when Hastings heard the voice of that
other, he was again awed by it.

"Think not that I haven't avenged myself!" the voice sneeringly
proclaimed.

Hastings looked. For the first time he noticed that the stranger's arm
was in a sling; there was a mole on the cheek near the corner of those
tightly compressed lips.

She shook like a leaf in a gale. For dread minutes she faced Hastings
tremblingly. Coming nearer to him she murmured:

"Are you badly hurt, my--my husband?"

Hastings glanced down at his own arm, on which her eyes seemed to rest;
then he suddenly beheld, almost as one beholds one's self in a mirror,
his counterpart recoil from her reach while he exclaimed scornfully:

"Don't--don't touch me! Nor pray think that your wiles will ever win
from me any forgiveness."

She stopped stock-still.

"Is he dead?" she demanded.

"Ah, then, you do admit, do you, that you love him?" the other flung
at her. "Say it to me! say it to me!" he charged, and he half closed his
eyes; "or--by Heaven! I will--"

Hastings felt the justice of this accusation, and turned doubtingly back
to the girl for her answer. She stared at him, waiting.

"What is the use?" she asked in despair. "Would you believe me?"

"If you _confess_ I will believe you," stated the stranger.

It seemed to Hastings that she grew visibly taller; her face underwent a
spasm of pain; and apparently unable longer to remain silent, she cried
out to him:

"Can it be that for you a confession is more to be believed than aught
which has not to be confessed?" And Hastings could feel the touch of her
hand cold on his wrist.

But the other insisted so convincingly that Hastings looked at him once
more with confidence.

"The truth," she said sadly, "is only for those who have faith; you--you
prefer the sinner, whom you may crush into a penitent. Your egotism
demands the power to forgive; you have not the courage to love."

The stranger took a step nearer her, but she was looking at Hastings.

"He is the only one who is worthy to believe me--he, whom you blame me
for loving. I do love him, then, but with a love no codes of yours can
understand. For I am innocent, to use the word by which you forgivingly
call the unjustly accused."

Hastings quailed beneath the bitterness of her irony; he saw, too, how
the man who so resembled him fell back against an old calico bag,
stuffed with remnants probably, that hung on a hook right behind where
he had been standing; but when he faced her once more, he marveled at
the change in her appearance.

Her brows were raised, contracted gently, resolutely; her eyes were
yearningly fixed on Hastings; her lips were parted tenderly for the
generous appeal she had at last found the need to make to him.

"Forgive me, O my husband!" she begged. "Nothing can come between
us, nothing shall. But I could not love you as I do if I loved not
others--if, for the chance love that came my way, I should give in
exchange no thanks. You understand me? You would not have me avoid
what I was made to love? You would not have me disregard the sunlight
and the sea and the stars in the sky? Yes, it is true, my husband, I
loved him. He said that my fingers on the spinet made into harmony all
the discords of the day; he said that I wove them away, with the notes
of birds and the sound of running brooks and the sighing of the wind,
into patterns, as in the long winter evenings I could spin flax at my
wheel. It made me happy to have him love me. It filled me with strength.
It taught me many new things I could do for you. John, John, say that
you forgive me?"

Though Hastings wanted to take her in his arms, he was impelled to turn
away from her and to view that silent figure still leaning against
the calico bag, whose head was lifted haughtily in deference to her
supplication.

"He loved you, too," she continued to Hastings, "because you loved
me. He did not mean to kiss me." She just raised her hands, as if
involuntarily, and let them fall at her sides. "You thought that he
was stealing me from you. He couldn't; he can't; and nobody can--now,
nor ever. His kiss was as pure as the perfume of lilies, pressed close
to breathe; it but made sweeter your love and mine, your life and mine."

"Adulteress! With my curses go to him, then, forever!"

The cry brought Hastings round to that other whose presence he had
forgotten. But next moment she was down before him; Hastings felt her
arms tight clasped about his knees.

"My husband, listen to me!" she implored. "I--we--there is somebody
else to be considered." Hastings shuddered. "We--you and I--shall be
the parents of a child! I have not told you. For the sake of our child,
from you, that child's father, I must ask forgiveness!"

She bowed her head sobbingly against Hastings. He put his hand on her
hair and was drawing her up to him when the stranger rushed forward to
tear her fiercely away.

"Lies! lies!" the stranger ranted. "Go to him, I tell you! _His_
child--his mistress shall not dishonor my house. Go to him, for he
isn't dead, and he needs you--you who are not needed here."

"Don't! don't!" she screamed out to Hastings. "I am your wife, the
mother of your--!"

Hastings sprang toward her. He saw that her hands were raised straight
up in the air. Just as he was about to reach forth to her, the stranger
plunged before him, caught the gray chiffon from her shoulders, and
pressed it madly on her throat. Hastings leaped upon him, pulled him
away, pinned him to the floor, rolled over him.

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