Henry James: Sir Edmund Orme

The statement appears to have been written, though the fragment is undated, long after the death of his wife, whom I take to have been one of the persons referred to. There is, however, nothing in the strange story to establish this point, which is, perhaps, not of importance. When I took possession of his effects I found these pages, in a locked drawer, among papers relating to the unfortunate lady’s too brief career (she died in childbirth a year after her marriage), letters, memoranda, accounts, faded photographs, cards of invitation. That is the only connection I can point to, and you may easily and will probably say that the tale is too extravagant to have had a demonstrable origin. I cannot, I admit, vouch for his having intended it as a report of real occurrence – I can only vouch for his general veracity. In any case it was written for himself, not for others. I offer it to others – having full option – precisely because it is so singular. Let them, in respect to the form of the thing, bear in mind that it was written quite for himself. I have altered nothing but the names.

If there’s a story in the matter I recognise the exact moment at which it began. This was on a soft, still Sunday noon in November, just after church, on the sunny Parade. Brighton was full of people; it was the height of the season, and the day was even more respectable than lovely – which helped to account for the multitude of walkers. The blue sea itself was decorous; it seemed to doze, with a gentle snore (if that be decorum), as if nature were preaching a sermon. After writing letters all the morning I had come out to take a look at it before luncheon. I was leaning over the rail which separates the King’s Road from the beach, and I think I was smoking a cigarette, when I became conscious of an intended joke in the shape of a light walking-stick laid across my shoulders. The idea, I found, had been thrown off by Teddy Bostwick, of the Rifles, and was intended as a contribution to talk. Our talk came off as we strolled together – he always took your arm to show you he forgave your obtuseness about his humour – and looked at the people, and bowed to some of them, and wondered who others were, and differed in opinion as to the prettiness of the girls. About Charlotte Marden we agreed, however, as we saw her coming toward us with her mother; and there surely could have been no one who wouldn’t have agreed with us. The Brighton air, of old, used to make plain girls pretty and pretty girls prettier still – I don’t know whether it works the spell now. The place, at any rate, was rare for complexions, and Miss Marden’s was one that made people turn round. It made us stop, heaven knows – at least, it was one of the things, for we already knew the ladies.

We turned with them, we joined them, we went where they were going. They were only going to the end and back – they had just come out of church. It was another manifestation of Teddy’s humour that he got immediate possession of Charlotte, leaving me to walk with her mother. However, I was not unhappy; the girl was before me and I had her to talk about. We prolonged our walk, Mrs Marden kept me, and presently she said she was tired and must sit down. We found a place on a sheltered bench – we gossiped as the people passed. It had already struck me, in this pair, that the resemblance between the mother and the daughter was wonderful even among such resemblances – the more so that it took so little account of a difference of nature. One often hears mature mothers spoken of as warnings – signposts, more or less discouraging, of the way daughters may go. But there was nothing deterrent in the idea that Charlotte, at fifty-five, should be as beautiful, even though it were conditioned on her being as pale and preoccupied, as Mrs Marden. At twenty-two she had a kind of rosy blankness and she was admirably handsome. Her head had the charming shape of her mother’s, and her features the same fine order. Then there were looks and movements and tones (moments when you could scarcely say whether it were aspect or sound), which, between the two personalities, were a reflection, a recall.

These ladies had a small fortune and a cheerful little house at Brighton, full of portraits and tokens and trophies (stuffed animals on the top of bookcases, and sallow, varnished fish under glass), to which Mrs Marden professed herself attached by pious memories. Her husband had been ‘ordered’ there in ill-health, to spend the last years of his life, and she had already mentioned to me that it was a place in which she felt herself still under the protection of his goodness. His goodness appeared to have been great, and she sometimes had the air of defending it against mysterious imputations. Some sense of protection, of an influence invoked and cherished, was evidently necessary to her; she had a dim wistfulness, a longing for security. She wanted friends and she had a good many. She was kind to me on our first meeting, and I never suspected her of the vulgar purpose of ‘making up’ to me – a suspicion, of course, unduly frequent in conceited young men. It never struck me that she wanted me for her daughter, nor yet, like some unnatural mammas, for herself. It was as if they had had a common deep, shy need and had been ready to say: ‘Oh, be friendly to us and be trustful! Don’t be afraid, you won’t be expected to marry us.’ “Of course there’s something about mamma; that’s really what makes her such a dear!” Charlotte said to me, confidentially, at an early stage of our acquaintance. She worshipped her mother’s appearance. It was the only thing she was vain of ; she accepted the raised eyebrows as a charming ultimate fact. “She looks as if she were waiting for the doctor, dear mamma,” she said on another occasion. “Perhaps you’re the doctor; do you think you are?” It appeared in the event that I had some healing power. At any rate when I learned, for she once dropped the remark, that Mrs Marden also thought there was something ‘awfully strange’ about Charlotte, the relation between the two ladies became extremely interesting. It was happy enough, at bottom; each had the other so much on her mind.

On the Parade the stream of strollers held its course, and Charlotte presently went by with Teddy Bostwick. She smiled and nodded and continued, but when she came back she stopped and spoke to us. Captain Bostwick positively declined to go in, he said the occasion was too jolly: might they therefore take another turn? Her mother dropped a “Do as you like”, and the girl gave me an impertinent smile over her shoulder as they quitted us. Teddy looked at me with his glass in one eye; but I didn’t mind that; it was only of Miss Marden I was thinking as I observed to my companion, laughing:

“She’s a bit of a coquette, you know.”

“Don’t say that – don’t say that!” Mrs Marden murmured.

“The nicest girls always are – just a little,” I was magnanimous enough to plead.

“Then why are they always punished?”

The intensity of the question startled me – it had come out in such a vivid flash. Therefore I had to think a moment before I inquired: “What do you know about it?”

“I was a bad girl myself.”

“And were you punished?”

“I carry it through life,” said Mrs Marden, looking away from me. “Ah!” she suddenly panted, in the next breath, rising to her feet and staring at her daughter, who had reappeared again with Captain Bostwick. She stood a few seconds, with the queerest expression in her face; then she sank upon the seat again and I saw that she had blushed crimson. Charlotte, who had observed her movement, came straight up to her and, taking her hand with quick tenderness, seated herself on the other side of her. The girl had turned pale – she gave her mother a fixed, frightened look. Mrs Marden, who had had some shock which escaped our detection, recovered herself ; that is she sat quiet and inexpressive, gazing at the indifferent crowd, the sunny air, the slumbering sea. My eye happened to fall, however, on the interlocked hands of the two ladies, and I quickly guessed that the grasp of the elder one was violent. Bostwick stood before them, wondering what was the matter and asking me from his little vacant disk if I knew; which led Charlotte to say to him after a moment, with a certain irritation:

“Don’t stand there that way, Captain Bostwick; go away – please go away.”

I got up at this, hoping that Mrs Marden wasn’t ill; but she immediately begged that we would not go away, that we would particularly stay and that we would presently come home to lunch. She drew me down beside her and for a moment I felt her hand pressing my arm in a way that might have been an involuntary betrayal of distress and might have been a private signal. What she might have wished to point out to me I couldn’t divine: perhaps she had seen somebody or something abnormal in the crowd. She explained to us in a few minutes that she was all right; that she was only liable to palpitations – they came as quickly as they went. It was time to move, and we moved. The incident was felt to be closed. Bostwick and I lunched with our sociable friends, and when I walked away with him he declared that he had never seen such dear kind creatures.

Mrs Marden had made us promise to come back the next day to tea, and had exhorted us in general to come as often as we could. Yet the next day, when at five o’clock I knocked at the door of the pretty house, it was to learn that the ladies had gone up to town. They had left a message for us with the butler: he was to say that they had suddenly been called – were very sorry. They would be absent a few days. This was all I could extract from the dumb domestic. I went again three days later, but they were still away; and it was not till the end of a week that I got a note from Mrs Marden, saying ‘We are back; do come and forgive us.’ It was on this occasion, I remember (the occasion of my going just after getting the note), that she told me she had intuitions. I don’t know how many people there were in England at that time in that predicament, but there were very few who would have mentioned it; so that the announcement struck me as original, especially as her point was that some of these uncanny promptings were connected with me. There were other people present – idle Brighton folk, old women with frightened eyes and irrelevant interjections – and I had but a few minutes’ talk with Charlotte; but the day after this I met them both at dinner and had the satisfaction of sitting next to Miss Marden. I recall that hour as the hour on which it first completely came over me that she was a beautiful, liberal creature. I had seen her personality in patches and gleams, like a song sung in snatches, but now it was before me in a large rosy glow, as if it had been a full volume of sound – I heard the whole of the air. It was sweet, fresh music – I was often to hum it over.

After dinner I had a few words with Mrs Marden; it was at the moment, late in the evening, when tea was handed about. A servant passed near us with a tray, I asked her if she would have a cup, and, on her assenting, took one and handed it to her. She put out her hand for it and I gave it to her, safely as I supposed; but as she was in the act of receiving it she started and faltered, so that the cup and saucer dropped with a crash of porcelain and without, on the part of my interlocutress, the usual woman’s movement to save her dress. I stooped to pick up the fragments and when I raised myself Mrs Marden was looking across the room at her daughter, who looked back at her smiling, but with an anxious light in her eyes. ‘Dear mamma, what on earth is the matter with you?’ the silent question seemed to say. Mrs Marden coloured, just as she had done after her strange movement on the Parade the other week, and I was therefore surprised when she said to me with unexpected assurance: “You should really have a steadier hand!” I had begun to stammer a defence of my hand when I became aware that she had fixed her eyes upon me with an intense appeal. It was ambiguous at first and only added to my confusion; then suddenly I understood, as plainly as if she had murmured ‘Make believe it was you – make believe it was you.’ The servant came back to take the morsels of the cup and wipe up the spilt tea, and while I was in the midst of making believe Mrs Marden abruptly brushed away from me and from her daughter’s attention and went into another room. I noticed that she gave no heed to the state of her dress.

I saw nothing more of either of them that evening, but the next morning, in the King’s Road, I met Miss Marden with a roll of music in her muff. She told me she had been a little way alone, to practise duets with a friend, and I asked her if she would go a little way further in company. She gave me leave to attend her to her door, and as we stood before it I inquired if I might go in. “No, not to-day – I don’t want you,” she said, candidly, though not roughly; while the words caused me to direct a wistful, disconcerted gaze at one of the windows of the house. It fell upon the white face of Mrs Marden, who was looking out at us from the drawing-room. She stood there long enough for me to see that it was she and not an apparition, as I had thought for a second, and then she vanished before her daughter had observed her. The girl, during our walk, had said nothing about her. As I had been told they didn’t want me I left them alone a little, after which circumstances supervened that kept us still longer apart. I finally went up to London, and while there I received a pressing invitation to come immediately down to Tranton, a pretty old place in Sussex belonging to a couple whose acquaintance I had lately made.

I went to Tranton from town, and on arriving found the Mardens, with a dozen other people, in the house. The first thing Mrs Marden said was: “Will you forgive me?” and when I asked what I had to forgive she answered: “My throwing my tea over you.” I replied that it had gone over herself ; whereupon she said: “At any rate I was very rude; but some day I think you’ll understand, and then you’ll make allowances for me.” The first day I was there she dropped two or three of these references (she had already indulged in more than one), to the mystic initiation that was in store for me; so that I began, as the phrase is, to chaff her about it, to say I would rather it were less wonderful and take it out at once. She answered that when it should come to me I would have to take it out – there would be little enough option. That it would come was privately clear to her, a deep presentiment, which was the only reason she had ever mentioned the matter. Didn’t I remember she had told me she had intuitions? From the first time of her seeing me she had been sure there were things I should not escape knowing. Meanwhile there was nothing to do but wait and keep cool, not to be precipitate. She particularly wished not to be any more nervous than she was. And I was above all not to be nervous myself – one got used to everything. I declared that though I couldn’t make out what she was talking about I was terribly frightened; the absence of a clue gave such a range to one’s imagination. I exaggerated on purpose; for if Mrs Marden was mystifying I can scarcely say she was alarming. I couldn’t imagine what she meant, but I wondered more than I shuddered. I might have said to myself that she was a little wrong in the upper storey; but that never occurred to me. She struck me as hopelessly right.

There were other girls in the house, but Charlotte Marden was the most charming; which was so generally felt to be the case that she really interfered with the slaughter of ground game. There were two or three men, and I was of the number, who actually preferred her to the society of the beaters. In short she was recognised as a form of sport superior and exquisite. She was kind to all of us – she made us go out late and come in early. I don’t know whether she flirted, but several other members of the party thought they did. Indeed, as regards himself, Teddy Bostwick, who had come over from Brighton, was visibly sure.

The third day I was at Tranton was a Sunday, and there was a very pretty walk to morning service over the fields. It was grey, windless weather, and the bell of the little old church that nestled in the hollow of the Sussex down sounded near and domestic. We were a straggling procession, in the mild damp air (which, as always at that season, gave one the feeling that after the trees were bare there was more of it – a larger sky), and I managed to fall a good way behind with Miss Marden. I remember entertaining, as we moved together over the turf, a strong impulse to say something intensely personal, something violent and important – important for me, such as that I had never seen her so lovely, or that that particular moment was the sweetest of my life. But always, in youth, such words have been on the lips many times before they are spoken; and I had the sense, not that I didn’t know her well enough (I cared little for that), but that she didn’t know me well enough. In the church, where there were old Tranton tombs and brasses, the big Tranton pew was full. Several of us were scattered, and I found a seat for Miss Marden, and another for myself beside it, at a distance from her mother and from most of our friends. There were two or three decent rustics on the bench, who moved in further to make room for us, and I took my place first, to cut off my companion from our neighbours. After she was seated there was still a space left, which remained empty till service was about half over.

This at least was the moment at which I became aware that another person had entered and had taken the seat. When I noticed him he had apparently been for some minutes in the pew, for he had settled himself and put down his hat beside him, and, with his hands crossed on the nob of his cane, was gazing before him at the altar. He was a pale young man in black, with the air of a gentleman. I was slightly startled on perceiving him, for Miss Marden had not attracted my attention to his entrance by moving to make room for him. After a few minutes, observing that he had no prayer-book, I reached across my neighbour and placed mine before him, on the ledge of the pew; a manœuvre the motive of which was not unconnected with the possibility that, in my own destitution, Miss Marden would give me one side of her velvet volume to hold. The pretext, however, was destined to fail for at the moment I offered him the book the intruder – whose intrusion I had so condoned – rose from his place without thanking me, stepped noiselessly out of the pew (it had no door), and, so discreetly as to attract no attention, passed down the centre of the church. A few minutes had sufficed for his devotions. His behaviour was unbecoming, his early departure even more than his late arrival; but he managed so quietly that we were not incommoded, and I perceived, on turning a little to glance after him, that nobody was disturbed by his withdrawal. I only noticed, and with surprise, that Mrs Marden had been so affected by it as to rise, involuntarily, an instant, in her place. She stared at him as he passed, but he passed very quickly, and she as quickly dropped down again, though not too soon to catch my eye across the church. Five minutes later I asked Miss Marden, in a low voice, if she would kindly pass me back my prayer-book – I had waited to see if she would spontaneously perform the act. She restored this aid to devotion, but had been so far from troubling herself about it that she could say to me as she did so: “Why on earth did you put it there?” I was on the point of answering her when she dropped on her knees, and I held my tongue. I had only been going to say: ‘To be decently civil.’

After the benediction, as we were leaving our places, I was slightly surprised, again, to see that Mrs Marden, instead of going out with her companions, had come up the aisle to join us, having apparently something to say to her daughter. She said it, but in an instant I observed that it was only a pretext – her real business was with me. She pushed Charlotte forward and suddenly murmured to me: “Did you see him?”

“The gentleman who sat down here? How could I help seeing him?”

“Hush!” she said, with the intensest excitement; “don’t speak to her – don’t tell her!” She slipped her hand into my arm, to keep me near her, to keep me, it seemed, away from her daughter. The precaution was unnecessary, for Teddy Bostwick had already taken possession of Miss Marden, and as they passed out of church in front of me I saw one of the other men close up on her other hand. It appeared to be considered that I had had my turn. Mrs Marden withdrew her hand from my arm as soon as we got out, but not before I felt that she had really needed the support. “Don’t speak to any one – don’t tell any one!” she went on.

“I don’t understand. Tell them what?”

“Why, that you saw him.”

“Surely they saw him for themselves.”

“Not one of them, not one of them.” She spoke in a tone of such passionate decision that I glanced at her – she was staring straight before her. But she felt the challenge of my eyes and she stopped short, in the old brown timber porch of the church, with the others well in advance of us, and said, looking at me now and in a quite extraordinary manner: “You’re the only person, the only person in the world.”

“But you, dear madam?”

“Oh me – of course. That’s my curse!” And with this she moved rapidly away from me to join the body of the party. I hovered on its outskirts on the way home, for I had food for rumination. Whom had I seen and why was the apparition – it rose before my mind’s eye very vividly again – invisible to the others? If an exception had been made for Mrs Marden, why did it constitute a curse, and why was I to share so questionable an advantage? This inquiry, carried on in my own locked breast, kept me doubtless silent enough during luncheon. After luncheon I went out on the old terrace to smoke a cigarette, but I had only taken a couple of turns when I perceived Mrs Marden’s moulded mask at the window of one of the rooms which opened on the crooked flags. It reminded me of the same flitting presence at the window at Brighton the day I met Charlotte and walked home with her. But this time my ambiguous friend didn’t vanish; she tapped on the pane and motioned me to come in. She was in a queer little apartment, one of the many reception-rooms of which the ground-floor at Tranton consisted; it was known as the Indian room and had a decoration vaguely Oriental – bamboo lounges, lacquered screens, lanterns with long fringes and strange idols in cabinets, objects not held to conduce to sociability. The place was little used, and when I went round to her we had it to ourselves. As soon as I entered she said to me: “Please tell me this; are you in love with my daughter?”

I hesitated a moment. “Before I answer your question will you kindly tell me what gives you the idea? I don’t consider that I have been very forward.”

Mrs Marden, contradicting me with her beautiful anxious eyes, gave me no satisfaction on the point I mentioned; she only went on strenuously:

“Did you say nothing to her on the way to church?”

“What makes you think I said anything?”

“The fact that you saw him.”

“Saw whom, dear Mrs Marden?”

“Oh, you know,” she answered, gravely, even a little reproachfully, as if I were trying to humiliate her by making her phrase the unphraseable.

“Do you mean the gentleman who formed the subject of your strange statement in church – the one who came into the pew?”

“You saw him, you saw him!” Mrs Marden panted, with a strange mixture of dismay and relief.

“Of course I saw him; and so did you.”

“It didn’t follow. Did you feel it to be inevitable?”

I was puzzled again. “Inevitable?”

“That you should see him?”

“Certainly, since I’m not blind.”

“You might have been; every one else is.” I was wonderfully at sea, and I frankly confessed it to my interlocutress; but the case was not made clearer by her presently exclaiming: “I knew you would, from the moment you should be really in love with her! I knew it would be the test – what do I mean? – the proof.”

“Are there such strange bewilderments attached to that high state?” I asked, smiling.

“You perceive there are. You see him, you see him!” Mrs Marden announced, with tremendous exaltation. “You’ll see him again.”

“I’ve no objection; but I shall take more interest in him if you’ll kindly tell me who he is.”

She hesitated, looking down a moment; then she said, raising her eyes: “I’ll tell you if you’ll tell me first what you said to her on the way to church.”

“Has she told you I said anything?”

“Do I need that?” smiled Mrs Marden.

“Oh yes, I remember – your intuitions! But I’m sorry to see they’re at fault this time; because I really said nothing to your daughter that was the least out of the way.”

“Are you very sure?”

“On my honour, Mrs Marden.”

“Then you consider that you’re not in love with her?”

“That’s another affair!” I laughed.

“You are – you are! You wouldn’t have seen him if you hadn’t been.”

“Who the deuce is he, then, madam?” I inquired with some irritation.

She would still only answer me with another question. “Didn’t you at least want to say something to her – didn’t you come very near it?”

The question was much to the point; it justified the famous intuitions. “Very near it – it was the turn of a hair. I don’t know what kept me quiet.”

“That was quite enough,” said Mrs Marden. “It isn’t what you say that determines it; it’s what you feel. That’s what he goes by.”

I was annoyed, at last, by her reiterated reference to an identity yet to be established, and I clasped my hands with an air of supplication which covered much real impatience, a sharper curiosity and even the first short throbs of a certain sacred dread. “I entreat you to tell me whom you’re talking about.”

She threw up her arms, looking away from me, as if to shake off both reserve and responsibility. “Sir Edmund Orme.”

“And who is Sir Edmund Orme?”

At the moment I spoke she gave a start. “Hush, here they come.” Then as, following the direction of her eyes, I saw Charlotte Marden on the terrace, at the window, she added, with an intensity of warning: “Don’t notice him – never!”

Charlotte, who had had her hands beside her eyes, peering into the room and smiling, made a sign that she was to be admitted, on which I went and opened the long window. Her mother turned away, and the girl came in with a laughing challenge: “What plot, in the world are you two hatching here?” Some plan – I forget what – was in prospect for the afternoon, as to which Mrs Marden’s participation or consent was solicited – my adhesion was taken for granted – and she had been half over the place in her quest. I was flurried, because I saw that Mrs Marden was flurried (when she turned round to meet her daughter she covered it by a kind of extravagance, throwing herself on the girl’s neck and embracing her), and to pass it off I said, fancifully, to Charlotte:

“I’ve been asking your mother for your hand.”

“Oh, indeed, and has she given it?” Miss Marden answered, gayly.

“She was just going to when you appeared there.”

“Well, it’s only for a moment – I’ll leave you free.”

“Do you like him, Charlotte?” Mrs Marden asked, with a candour I scarcely expected.

“It’s difficult to say it before him isn’t it?” the girl replied, entering into the humour of the thing, but looking at me as if she didn’t like me.

She would have had to say it before another person as well, for at that moment there stepped into the room from the terrace (the window had been left open), a gentleman who had come into sight, at least into mine, only within the instant. Mrs Marden had said “Here they come,” but he appeared to have followed her daughter at a certain distance. I immediately recognised him as the personage who had sat beside us in church. This time I saw him better, saw that his face and his whole air were strange. I speak of him as a personage, because one felt, indescribably, as if a reigning prince had come into the room. He held himself with a kind of habitual majesty, as if he were different from us. Yet he looked fixedly and gravely at me, till I wondered what he expected of me. Did he consider that I should bend my knee or kiss his hand? He turned his eyes in the same way on Mrs Marden, but she knew what to do. After the first agitation produced by his approach she took no notice of him whatever; it made me remember her passionate adjuration to me. I had to achieve a great effort to imitate her, for though I knew nothing about him but that he was Sir Edmund Orme I felt his presence as a strong appeal, almost as an oppression. He stood there without speaking – young, pale, handsome, clean-shaven, decorous, with extraordinary light blue eyes and something old-fashioned, like a portrait of years ago, in his head, his manner of wearing his hair. He was in complete mourning (one immediately felt that he was very well dressed), and he carried his hat in his hand. He looked again strangely hard at me, harder than any one in the world had ever looked before; and I remember feeling rather cold and wishing he would say something. No silence had ever seemed to me so soundless. All this was of course an impression intensely rapid; but that it had consumed some instants was proved to me suddenly by the aspect of Charlotte Marden, who stared from her mother to me and back again (he never looked at her, and she had no appearance of looking at him), and then broke out with: “What on earth is the matter with you? You’ve such odd faces!” I felt the colour come back to mine, and when she went on in the same tone: “One would think you had seen a ghost!” I was conscious that I had turned very red. Sir Edmund Orme never blushed, and I could see that he had no capacity for embarrassment. One had met people of that sort, but never any one with such a grand indifference.

“Don’t be impertinent; and go and tell them all that I’ll join them,” said Mrs Marden with much dignity, but with a quaver in her voice.

“And will you come – you?” the girl asked, turning away. I made no answer, taking the question, somehow, as meant for her companion. But he was more silent than I, and when she reached the door (she was going out that way), she stopped, with her hand on the knob, and looked at me, repeating it. I assented, springing forward to open the door for her, and as she passed out she exclaimed to me mockingly: “You haven’t got your wits about you – you sha’n’t have my hand!”

I closed the door and turned round to find that Sir Edmund Orme had during the moment my back was presented to him retired by the window. Mrs Marden stood there and we looked at each other long. It had only then – as the girl flitted away – come home to me that her daughter was unconscious of what had happened. It was that, oddly enough, that gave me a sudden, sharp shake, and not my own perception of our visitor, which appeared perfectly natural. It made the fact vivid to me that she had been equally unaware of him in church, and the two facts together – now that they were over – set my heart more sensibly beating. I wiped my forehead, and Mrs Marden broke out with a low distressful wail: “Now you know my life – now you know my life!”

“In God’s name who is he – what is he?”

“He’s a man I wronged.”

“How did you wrong him?”

“Oh, awfully – years ago.”

“Years ago? Why, he’s very young.”

“Young – young?” cried Mrs Marden. “He was born before I was!”

“Then why does he look so?”

She came nearer to me, she laid her hand on my arm, and there was something in her face that made me shrink a little. “Don’t you understand – don’t you feel?” she murmured, reproachfully.

“I feel very queer!” I laughed; and I was conscious that my laugh betrayed it.

“He’s dead!” said Mrs Marden, from her white face.

“Dead?” I panted. “Then that gentleman was—?” I couldn’t even say the word.

“Call him what you like – there are twenty vulgar names. He’s a perfect presence.”

“He’s a splendid presence!” I cried. “The place is haunted – haunted!” I exulted in the word as if it represented the fulfilment of my dearest dream.

“It isn’t the place – more’s the pity! That has nothing to do with it!”

“Then it’s you, dear lady?” I said, as if this were still better.

“No, nor me either – I wish it were!”

“Perhaps it’s me,” I suggested with a sickly smile.

“It’s nobody but my child – my innocent, innocent child!” And with this Mrs Marden broke down – she dropped into a chair and burst into tears. I stammered some question – I pressed on her some bewildered appeal, but she waved me off, unexpectedly and passionately. I persisted – couldn’t I help her, couldn’t I intervene? “You have intervened,” she sobbed; “you’re in it, you’re in it.”

“I’m very glad to be in anything so curious,” I boldly declared.

“Glad or not, you can’t get out of it.”

“I don’t want to get out of it – it’s too interesting.”

“I’m glad you like it. Go away.”

“But I want to know more about it.”

“You’ll see all you want – go away!”

“But I want to understand what I see.”

“How can you – when I don’t understand myself?”

“We’ll do so together – we’ll make it out.”

At this she got up, doing what she could to obliterate her tears. “Yes, it will be better together – that’s why I’ve liked you.”

“Oh, we’ll see it through!” I declared.

“Then you must control yourself better.”

“I will, I will – with practice.”

“You’ll get used to it,” said Mrs Marden, in a tone I never forgot. “But go and join them – I’ll come in a moment.”

I passed out to the terrace and I felt that I had a part to play. So far from dreading another encounter with the ‘perfect presence’, as Mrs Marden called it, I was filled with an excitement that was positively joyous. I desired a renewal of the sensation – I opened myself wide to the impression; I went round the house as quickly as if I expected to overtake Sir Edmund Orme. I didn’t overtake him just then, but the day was not to close without my recognising that, as Mrs Marden had said, I should see all I wanted of him.

We took, or most of us took, the collective sociable walk which, in the English country-house, is the consecrated pastime on Sunday afternoons. We were restricted to such a regulated ramble as the ladies were good for; the afternoons, moreover, were short, and by five o’clock we were restored to the fireside in the hall, with a sense, on my part at least, that we might have done a little more for our tea. Mrs Marden had said she would join us, but she had not appeared; her daughter, who had seen her again before we went out, only explained that she was tired. She remained invisible all the afternoon, but this was a detail to which I gave as little heed as I had given to the circumstance of my not having Miss Marden to myself during all our walk. I was too much taken up with another emotion to care; I felt beneath my feet the threshold of the strange door, in my life, which had suddenly been thrown open and out of which unspeakable vibrations played up through me like a fountain. I had heard all my days of apparitions, but it was a different thing to have seen one and to know that I should in all probability see it familiarly, as it were, again. I was on the look-out for it, as a pilot for the flash of a revolving light, and I was ready to generalise on the sinister subject, to declare that ghosts were much less alarming and much more amusing than was commonly supposed. There is no doubt that I was extremely nervous. I couldn’t get over the distinction conferred upon me – the exception (in the way of mystic enlargement of vision), made in my favour. At the same time I think I did justice to Mrs Marden’s absence; it was a commentary on what she had said to me – “Now you know my life.” She had probably been seeing Sir Edmund Orme for years, and, not having my firm fibre, she had broken down under him. Her nerve was gone, though she had also been able to attest that, in a degree, one got used to him. She had got used to breaking down.

Afternoon tea, when the dusk fell early, was a friendly hour at Tranton; the firelight played into the wide, white last-century hall; sympathies almost confessed themselves, lingering together, before dressing, on deep sofas, in muddy boots, for last words, after walks; and even solitary absorption in the third volume of a novel that was wanted by some one else seemed a form of geniality. I watched my moment and went over to Charlotte Marden when I saw she was about to withdraw. The ladies had left the place one by one, and after I had addressed myself particularly to Miss Marden the three men who were near her gradually dispersed. We had a little vague talk – she appeared preoccupied, and heaven knows I was – after which she said she must go: she should be late for dinner. I proved to her by book that she had plenty of time, and she objected that she must at any rate go up to see her mother: she was afraid she was unwell.

“On the contrary, she’s better than she has been for a long time – I’ll guarantee that,” I said. “She has found out that she can have confidence in me, and that has done her good.” Miss Marden had dropped into her chair again. I was standing before her, and she looked up at me without a smile – with a dim distress in her beautiful eyes; not exactly as if I were hurting her, but as if she were no longer disposed to treat as a joke what had passed (whatever it was, it was at the same time difficult to be serious about it), between her mother and myself. But I could answer her inquiry in all kindness and candour, for I was really conscious that the poor lady had put off a part of her burden on me and was proportionately relieved and eased. “I’m sure she has slept all the afternoon as she hasn’t slept for years,” I went on. “You have only to ask her.”

Charlotte got up again. “You make yourself out very useful.”

“You’ve a good quarter of an hour,” I said. “Haven’t I a right to talk to you a little this way, alone, when your mother has given me your hand?”

“And is it your mother who has given me yours? I’m much obliged to her, but I don’t want it. I think our hands are not our mothers’ – they happen to be our own!” laughed the girl.

“Sit down, sit down and let me tell you!” I pleaded.

I still stood before her, urgently, to see if she wouldn’t oblige me. She hesitated a moment, looking vaguely this way and that, as if under a compulsion that was slightly painful. The empty hall was quiet – we heard the loud ticking of the great clock. Then she slowly sank down and I drew a chair close to her. This made me face round to the fire again, and with the movement I perceived, disconcertedly, that we were not alone. The next instant, more strangely than I can say, my discomposure, instead of increasing, dropped, for the person before the fire was Sir Edmund Orme. He stood there as I had seen him in the Indian room, looking at me with the expressionless attention which borrowed its sternness from his sombre distinction. I knew so much more about him now that I had to check a movement of recognition, an acknowledgment of his presence. When once I was aware of it, and that it lasted, the sense that we had company, Charlotte and I, quitted me; it was impressed on me on the contrary that I was more intensely alone with Miss Marden. She evidently saw nothing to look at, and I made a tremendous and very nearly successful effort to conceal from her that my own situation was different. I say ‘very nearly’, because she watched me an instant – while my words were arrested – in a way that made me fear she was going to say again, as she had said in the Indian room: ‘What on earth is the matter with you?’

What the matter with me was I quickly told her, for the full knowledge of it rolled over me with the touching spectacle of her unconsciousness. It was touching that she became, in the presence of this extraordinary portent. What was portended, danger or sorrow, bliss or bane, was a minor question; all I saw, as she sat there, was that, innocent and charming, she was close to a horror, as she might have thought it, that happened to be veiled from her but that might at any moment be disclosed. I didn’t mind it now, as I found, but nothing was more possible than she should, and if it wasn’t curious and interesting it might easily be very dreadful. If I didn’t mind it for myself, as I afterwards saw, this was largely because I was so taken up with the idea of protecting her. My heart beat high with this idea, on the spot; I determined to do everything I could to keep her sense sealed. What I could do might have been very obscure to me if I had not, in all this, become more aware than of anything else that I loved her. The way to save her was to love her, and the way to love her was to tell her, now and here, that I did so. Sir Edmund Orme didn’t prevent me, especially as after a moment he turned his back to us and stood looking discreetly at the fire. At the end of another moment he leaned his head on his arm, against the chimneypiece, with an air of gradual dejection, like a spirit still more weary than discreet. Charlotte Marden was startled by what I said to her, and she jumped up to escape it; but she took no offence – my tenderness was too real. She only moved about the room with a deprecating murmur, and I was so busy following up any little advantage that I might have obtained that I didn’t notice in what manner Sir Edmund Orme disappeared. I only observed presently that he had gone. This made no difference – he had been so small a hindrance; I only remember being struck, suddenly, with something inexorable in the slow, sweet, sad headshake that Miss Marden gave me.

“I don’t ask for an answer now,” I said; “I only want you to be sure – to know how much depends on it.”

“Oh, I don’t want to give it to you, now or ever!” she replied. “I hate the subject, please – I wish one could be let alone.” And then, as if I might have found something harsh in this irrepressible, artless cry of beauty beset, she added quickly, vaguely, kindly, as she left the room: “Thank you, thank you – thank you so much!”

At dinner I could be generous enough to be glad, for her, that I was placed on the same side of the table with her, where she couldn’t see me. Her mother was nearly opposite to me, and just after we had sat down Mrs Marden gave me one long, deep look, in which all our strange communion was expressed. It meant of course ‘She has told me,’ but it meant other things beside. At any rate I know what my answering look to her conveyed: ‘I’ve seen him again – I’ve seen him again!’ This didn’t prevent Mrs Marden from treating her neighbours with her usual scrupulous blandness. After dinner, when, in the drawing-room, the men joined the ladies and I went straight up to her to tell her how I wished we could have some private conversation, she said immediately, in a low tone, looking down at her fan while she opened and shut it:

“He’s here – he’s here.”

“Here?” I looked round the room, but I was disappointed.

“Look where she is,” said Mrs Marden, with just the faintest asperity. Charlotte was in fact not in the main saloon, but in an apartment into which it opened and which was known as the morning-room. I took a few steps and saw her, through a doorway, upright in the middle of the room, talking with three gentlemen whose backs were practically turned to me. For a moment my quest seemed vain; then I recognised that one of the gentlemen – the middle one – was Sir Edmund Orme. This time it was surprising that the others didn’t see him. Charlotte seemed to be looking straight at him, addressing her conversation to him. She saw me after an instant, however, and immediately turned her eyes away. I went back to her mother with an annoyed sense that the girl would think I was watching her, which would be unjust. Mrs Marden had found a small sofa – a little apart – and I sat down beside her. There were some questions I had so wanted to go into that I wished we were once more in the Indian room. I presently gathered, however, that our privacy was all-sufficient. We communicated so closely and completely now, and with such silent reciprocities, that it would in every circumstance be adequate.

“Oh, yes, he’s there,” I said; “and at about a quarter-past seven he was in the hall.”

“I knew it at the time, and I was so glad!”

“So glad?”

“That it was your affair, this time, and not mine. It’s a rest for me.”

“Did you sleep all the afternoon?” I asked.

“As I haven’t done for months. But how did you know that?”

“As you knew, I take it, that Sir Edmund was in the hall. We shall evidently each of us know things now – where the other is concerned.”

“Where he is concerned,” Mrs Marden amended. “It’s a blessing, the way you take it,” she added, with a long, mild sigh.

“I take it as a man who’s in love with your daughter.”

“Of course – of course.” Intense as I now felt my desire for the girl to be, I couldn’t help laughing a little at the tone of these words; and it led my companion immediately to say: “Otherwise you wouldn’t have seen him.”

“But every one doesn’t see him who’s in love with her, or there would be dozens.”

“They’re not in love with her as you are.”

“I can, of course, only speak for myself ; and I found a moment, before dinner, to do so.”

“She told me immediately.”

“And have I any hope – any chance?”

“That’s what I long for, what I pray for.”

“Ah, how can I thank you enough?” I murmured.

“I believe it will all pass – if she loves you,” Mrs Marden continued.

“It will all pass?”

“We shall never see him again.”

“Oh, if she loves me I don’t care how often I see him!”

“Ah, you take it better than I could,” said my companion. “You have the happiness not to know – not to understand.”

“I don’t indeed. What on earth does he want?”

“He wants to make me suffer.” She turned her wan face upon me with this, and I saw now for the first time, fully, how perfectly, if this had been Sir Edmund Orme’s purpose, he had succeeded. “For what I did to him,” Mrs Marden explained.

“And what did you do to him?”

She looked at me a moment. “I killed him.” As I had seen him fifty yards away only five minutes before the words gave me a start. “Yes, I make you jump; be careful. He’s there still, but he killed himself. I broke his heart – he thought me awfully bad. We were to have been married, but I broke it off – just at the last. I saw some one I liked better; I had no reason but that. It wasn’t for interest, or money, or position, or anything of that sort. All those things were his. It was simply that I fell in love with Captain Marden. When I saw him I felt that I couldn’t marry any one else. I wasn’t in love with Edmund Orme – my mother, my elder sister had brought it about. But he did love me. I told him I didn’t care – that I couldn’t, that I wouldn’t. I threw him over, and he took something, some abominable drug or draught that proved fatal. It was dreadful, it was horrible, he was found that way – he died in agony. I married Captain Marden, but not for five years. I was happy, perfectly happy; time obliterates. But when my husband died I began to see him.”

I had listened intently, but I wondered. “To see your husband?”

“Never, never that way, thank God! To see him, with Chartie – always with Chartie. The first time it nearly killed me – about seven years ago, when she first came out. Never when I’m by myself – only with her. Sometimes not for months, then every day for a week. I’ve tried everything to break the spell – doctors and régimes and climates; I’ve prayed to God on my knees. That day at Brighton, on the Parade with you, when you thought I was ill, that was the first for an age. And then, in the evening, when I knocked my tea over you, and the day you were at the door with Charlotte and I saw you from the window – each time he was there.”

“I see, I see.” I was more thrilled than I could say. “It’s an apparition like another.”

“Like another? Have you ever seen another?”

“No, I mean the sort of thing one has heard of. It’s tremendously interesting to encounter a case.”

“Do you call me a ‘case’?” Mrs Marden asked, with exquisite resentment.

“I mean myself.”

“Oh, you’re the right one!” she exclaimed. “I was right when I trusted you.”

“I’m devoutly grateful you did; but what made you do it?”

“I had thought the whole thing out – I had had time to in those dreadful years, while he was punishing me in my daughter.”

“Hardly that,” I objected, “if she never knew.”

“That has been my terror, that she will, from one occasion to another. I’ve an unspeakable dread of the effect on her.”

“She sha’n’t, she sha’n’t!” I declared, so loud that several people looked round. Mrs Marden made me get up, and I had no more talk with her that evening. The next day I told her I must take my departure from Tranton – it was neither comfortable nor considerate to remain as a rejected suitor. She was disconcerted, but she accepted my reasons, only saying to me out of her mournful eyes: ‘You’ll leave me alone then with my burden?’ It was of course understood between us that for many weeks to come there would be no discretion in ‘worrying poor Charlotte’: such were the terms in which, with odd feminine and maternal inconsistency, she alluded to an attitude on my part that she favoured. I was prepared to be heroically considerate, but it seemed to me that even this delicacy permitted me to say a word to Miss Marden before I went. I begged her, after breakfast, to take a turn with me on the terrace, and as she hesitated, looking at me distantly, I informed her that it was only to ask her a question and to say good-bye – I was leaving Tranton for her.

She came out with me, and we passed slowly round the house three or four times. Nothing is finer than this great airy platform, from which every look is a sweep of the country, with the sea on the furthest edge. It might have been that as we passed the windows we were conspicuous to our friends in the house, who would divine, sarcastically, why I was so significantly bolting. But I didn’t care; I only wondered whether they wouldn’t really this time make out Sir Edmund Orme, who joined us on one of our turns and strolled slowly on the other side of my companion. Of what transcendent essence he was composed I knew not; I have no theory about him (leaving that to others), any more than I have one about such or such another of my fellow-mortals whom I have elbowed in life. He was as positive, as individual, as ultimate a fact as any of these. Above all he was as respectable, as sensitive a fact; so that I should no more have thought of taking a liberty, of practising an experiment with him, of touching him, for instance, or speaking to him, since he set the example of silence, than I should have thought of committing any other social grossness. He had always, as I saw more fully later, the perfect propriety of his position – had always the appearance of being dressed and, in attitude and aspect, of comporting himself, as the occasion demanded. He looked strange, incontestably, but somehow he always looked right. I very soon came to attach an idea of beauty to his unmentionable presence, the beauty of an old story of love and pain. What I ended by feeling was that he was on my side, that he was watching over my interest, that he was looking to it that my heart shouldn’t be broken. Oh, he had taken it seriously, his own catastrophe – he had certainly proved that in his day. If poor Mrs Marden, as she told me, had thought it out, I also subjected the case to the finest analysis of which my intellect was capable. It was a case of retributive justice. The mother was to pay, in suffering, for the suffering she had inflicted, and as the disposition to jilt a lover might have been transmitted to the daughter, the daughter was to be watched, so that she might be made to suffer should she do an equal wrong. She might reproduce her mother in character as vividly as she did in face. On the day she should transgress, in other words, her eyes would be opened suddenly and unpitiedly to the ‘perfect presence’, which she would have to work as she could into her conception of a young lady’s universe. I had no great fear for her, because I didn’t believe she was, in any cruel degree, a coquette. We should have a good deal of ground to get over before I, at least, should be in a position to be sacrificed by her. She couldn’t throw me over before she had made a little more of me.

The question I asked her on the terrace that morning was whether I might continue, during the winter, to come to Mrs Marden’s house. I promised not to come too often and not to speak to her for three months of the question I had raised the day before. She replied that I might do as I liked, and on this we parted.

I carried out the vow I had made her; I held my tongue for my three months. Unexpectedly to myself there were moments of this time when she struck me as capable of playing with a man. I wanted so to make her like me that I became subtle and ingenious, wonderfully alert, patiently diplomatic. Sometimes I thought I had earned my reward, brought her to the point of saying: ‘Well, well, you’re the best of them all – you may speak to me now.’ Then there was a greater blankness than ever in her beauty, and on certain days a mocking light in her eyes, of which the meaning seemed to be: ‘If you don’t take care, I will accept you, to have done with you the more effectually.’ Mrs Marden was a great help to me simply by believing in me, and I valued her faith all the more that it continued even though there was a sudden intermission of the miracle that had been wrought for me. After our visit to Tranton Sir Edmund Orme gave us a holiday, and I confess it was at first a disappointment to me. I felt less designated, less connected with Charlotte. “Oh, don’t cry till you’re out of the wood,” her mother said; “he has let me off sometimes for six months. He’ll break out again when you least expect it – he knows what he’s about.” For her these weeks were happy, and she was wise enough not to talk about me to the girl. She was so good as to assure me that I was taking the right way, that I looked as if I felt secure and that in the long run women give way to that. She had known them do it even when the man was a fool for looking so – or was a fool on any terms. For herself she felt it to be a good time, a sort of St Martin’s summer of the soul. She was better than she had been for years, and she had me to thank for it. The sense of visitation was light upon her – she wasn’t in anguish every time she looked round. Charlotte contradicted me very often, but she contradicted herself still more. That winter was a wonder of mildness, and we often sat out in the sun. I walked up and down with Charlotte, and Mrs Marden, sometimes on a bench, sometimes in a bath-chair, waited for us and smiled at us as we passed. I always looked out for a sign in her face – ‘He’s with you, he’s with you’ (she would see him before I should), but nothing came; the season had brought us also a sort of spiritual softness. Toward the end of April the air was so like June that, meeting my two friends one night at some Brighton sociability – an evening party with amateur music – I drew Miss Marden unresistingly out upon a balcony to which a window in one of the rooms stood open. The night was close and thick, the stars were dim, and below us, under the cliff, we heard the regular rumble of the sea. We listened to it a little and we heard mixed with it, from within the house, the sound of a violin accompanied by a piano – a performance which had been our pretext for passing out.

“Do you like me a little better?” I asked, abruptly, after a minute. “Could you listen to me again?”

I had no sooner spoken than she laid her hand quickly, with a certain force, on my arm. “Hush! – isn’t there some one there?” She was looking into the gloom of the far end of the balcony. This balcony ran the whole width of the house, a width very great in the best of the old houses at Brighton. We were lighted a little by the open window behind us, but the other windows, curtained within, left the darkness undiminished, so that I made out but dimly the figure of a gentleman standing there and looking at us. He was in evening dress, like a guest – I saw the vague shine of his white shirt and the pale oval of his face – and he might perfectly have been a guest who had stepped out in advance of us to take the air. Miss Marden took him for one at first – then evidently, even in a few seconds, she saw that the intensity of his gaze was unconventional. What else she saw I couldn’t determine; I was too taken up with my own impression to do more than feel the quick contact of her uneasiness. My own impression was in fact the strongest of sensations, a sensation of horror; for what could the thing mean but that the girl at last saw? I heard her give a sudden, gasping “Ah!” and move quickly into the house. It was only afterwards that I knew that I myself had had a totally new emotion – my horror passing into anger, and my anger into a stride along the balcony with a gesture of reprobation. The case was simplified to the vision of a frightened girl whom I loved. I advanced to vindicate her security, but I found nothing there to meet me. It was either all a mistake or Sir Edmund Orme had vanished.

I followed Miss Marden immediately, but there were symptoms of confusion in the drawing-room when I passed in. A lady had fainted, the music had stopped; there was a shuffling of chairs and a pressing forward. The lady was not Charlotte, as I feared, but Mrs Marden, who had suddenly been taken ill. I remember the relief with which I learned this, for to see Charlotte stricken would have been anguish, and her mother’s condition gave a channel to her agitation. It was of course all a matter for the people of the house and for the ladies, and I could have no share in attending to my friends or in conducting them to their carriage. Mrs Marden revived and insisted on going home, after which I uneasily withdrew.

I called the next morning to ask about her and was informed that she was better, but when I asked if Miss Marden would see me the message sent down was that it was impossible. There was nothing for me to do all day but to roam about with a beating heart. But toward evening I received a line in pencil, brought by hand – ‘Please come; mother wishes you.’ Five minutes afterward I was at the door again and ushered into the drawing-room. Mrs Marden lay upon the sofa, and as soon as I looked at her I saw the shadow of death in her face. But the first thing she said was that she was better, ever so much better; her poor old heart had been behaving queerly again, but now it was quiet. She gave me her hand and I bent over her with my eyes in hers, and in this way I was able to read what she didn’t speak – ‘I’m really very ill, but appear to take what I say exactly as I say it.’ Charlotte stood there beside her, looking not frightened now, but intensely grave, and not meeting my eyes. “She has told me – she has told me!” her mother went on.

“She has told you?” I stared from one of them to the other, wondering if Mrs Marden meant that the girl had spoken to her of the circumstances on the balcony.

“That you spoke to her again – that you’re admirably faithful.”

I felt a thrill of joy at this; it showed me that that memory had been uppermost, and also that Charlotte had wished to say the thing that would soothe her mother most, not the thing that would alarm her. Yet I now knew, myself, as well as if Mrs Marden had told me, that she knew and had known at the moment what her daughter had seen. “I spoke – I spoke, but she gave me no answer,” I said.

“She will now, won’t you, Chartie? I want it so, I want it!” the poor lady murmured, with ineffable wistfulness.

“You’re very good to me,” Charlotte said to me, seriously and sweetly, looking fixedly on the carpet. There was something different in her, different from all the past. She had recognised something, she felt a coercion. I could see that she was trembling.

“Ah, if you would let me show you how good I can be!” I exclaimed, holding out my hands to her. As I uttered the words I was touched with the knowledge that something had happened. A form had constituted itself on the other side of the bed, and the form leaned over Mrs Marden. My whole being went forth into a mute prayer that Charlotte shouldn’t see it and that I should be able to betray nothing. The impulse to glance toward Mrs Marden was even stronger than the involuntary movement of taking in Sir Edmund Orme; but I could resist even that, and Mrs Marden was perfectly still. Charlotte got up to give me her hand, and with the definite act she saw. She gave, with a shriek, one stare of dismay, and another sound, like a wail of one of the lost, fell at the same instant on my ear. But I had already sprung toward the girl to cover her, to veil her face. She had already thrown herself into my arms. I held her there a moment – bending over her, given up to her, feeling each of her throbs with my own and not knowing which was which; then, all of a sudden, coldly, I gathered that we were alone. She released herself. The figure beside the sofa had vanished; but Mrs Marden lay in her place with closed eyes, with something in her stillness that gave us both another terror. Charlotte expressed it in the cry of “Mother, mother!” with which she flung herself down. I fell on my knees beside her. Mrs Marden had passed away.

Was the sound I heard when Chartie shrieked – the other and still more tragic sound I mean – the despairing cry of the poor lady’s death-shock or the articulate sob (it was like a waft from a great tempest), of the exorcised and pacified spirit? Possibly the latter, for that was, mercifully, the last of Sir Edmund Orme.