H. C. Bunner

“ Another step, and the red rays fell on the Venetian glass, and it burned and glowed, and the green serpents twined about its ruby stem seemed to twist and crawl with malignant life, while their scorching eyes shot fire. Another step, and she stood by the bedside. As John Manning reached out his hand for the goblet, a tremor passed through her, her fingers clinched the fragile stem, and the glass fell on the floor and was shattered to shivers as its fellow had been shattered three centuries ago and more. ”

“ Perhaps I should say She came; but it is not the woman we love; it is our dream of her. Sweet and tender, fair and good, she may be; but let it be honor enough for her that she has that glory about her face which our love kindles to the halo that lights many a man’s life to the grave, though the face beneath it be dead or false.
I will not admit that it was only a pretty girl from Philadelphia who came to Sand Hills that first week in July. ”

“ All we know about the running other folks are making in this world!
Half-way up the track Horace stopped short, panting hard, his heart beating like a crazy drum, a nervous shiver on him. Up the track there was a dull whirr, and he saw the engine of the express-train slipping down on him—past the station already.
The white mists from the marshes had risen up over the embankment. The last rays of the sunset shot through them, brilliant and blinding. Horace could see the engine; but would the engineer see him, waving his hands in futile gestures, in time to stop on that slippery, sharp grade? ”

“ Horace hung in his embrace, too deadly weak even to accept the offer of one of the dozen flasks that were thrust at him. Nothing was very clear in his mind; as far as he could make out, his most distinct impression was of a broad, flat beach, a blue sea and a blue sky, a black steamer making a black trail of smoke across them, and a voice soft as an angel’s reading Latin close by him. ”

“ Laurence Laughton entered the room with a quick step, but the light-hearted words with which he had meant to encourage his friend died on his lips as soon as he saw how grievously that friend had changed. John Manning had faded to a shadow of his former self; the light of his eye was quenched, and the spirit within him seemed broken; the fine, sensitive, noble face lay white against the pillow, looking weary and wan and hopeless. ”

“ To-day an old man walks up and down my lonely drawing-rooms, with bent head, murmuring to himself odds and ends of tawdry old eloquence, wandering in a dead land of memory, waiting till Death shall take him by the hand and lead him out of his ruinous house, out of his ruinous life.”
Death had indeed come between Horace and the creation of his spiritual vision. ”

“ I was taking count, so to speak, of my prosperity—the material treasures, the better treasure that I find in such portion of fame as the world has allotted me, and the treasure of treasures across the threshold of the next room—in the next room? No—there, here, in every room, in every corner of the house, filling it with peace, is the gentle and holy spirit of love. ”

“ You are staying your hunger in sleep; for one may not eat until the other comes. I will wake you up, and we shall feast together and talk over the day that is dead and the day that is begun.
Strange, is it not, that I should have some trouble to realize that this is only a memory,—I, with my feet in the bearskin rug that it would have beggared the two of us, or a dozen like us, to purchase in those days. Strange that my mind should be wandering on the crude work of my boyhood and my early manhood. I who have won name and fame, as the world would say. ”

“ He had never thought of the sex of a spook, but there was no doubt [163] whatever that the house ghost was a woman. No sooner was this firmly fixed in Eliphalet’s mind than he saw his way out of the difficulty. The ghosts must be married!—for then there would be no more interference, no more quarrelling, no more manifestations and materializations, no more dark séances, with their raps and bells and tambourines and banjos. At first the ghosts would not hear of it. The voice in the corner declared that the Duncan wraith had never thought of matrimony. ”

“ We know that in some subtle way it has been given to a man to see a woman’s soul as he sees his own, and to a woman to look into a man’s heart as if it were, indeed, hers. But the friend who sits at my table, seeing that my wife and I understand each other at a simple meeting of the eyes, makes no more of it than he does of the glance of intelligence which, with close friends, often takes the place of speech. ”

“ He knew that Venice would be too hot to hold him when the deed was done; and besides, he felt that without his brother life in Venice would be intolerable So he made ready for flight. Twenty-four hours to a minute after Marco Manin’s death the body of the hireling assassin was sinking to the bottom of the Grand Canal, while the man who had paid for the murder lay dead on the same spot with the point of a glass stiletto in his heart! And when they wanted to send him the other goblet, there was no one to send it to: Giovanni Manin had disappeared.”
“Where had he gone?” queried John Manning. ”

“ Eliphalet Duncan went to the White Mountains, and in the car of the railroad that runs to the top of Mount Washington he met a classmate whom he had not seen for years, and this classmate introduced Duncan to his sister, and this sister was a remarkably pretty girl, and Duncan fell in love with her at first sight, and by the time he got to the top of Mount Washington he was so deep in love that he began to consider his own unworthiness, and to wonder whether she might ever be induced to care for him a little—ever so little. ”

“ Sell this house for what it will bring, and put the money into government bonds. You may find it hard to persuade her to move, for she seems to have a strange liking for this place. She breathes freely in the deadly air that suffocates me. But you must not let her remain here; this is no place for her now that a new life and new duties are before her.”
“How was it I did not know of your marriage?” asked Larry.
“I knew nothing about it myself twenty-four hours before it happened,” answered John Manning. “You need not look surprised. It is a simple story. ”

“ Judge Weeden missed his active and intelligent obedience in the daily routine of office business; but the Judge thought it was just as well that Horace should not know that fact. The young man’s time would come soon enough, and he would be none the worse for serving his apprenticeship in modesty and humility. The work entrusted to him was an honor in itself. And then, there was no reason why poor Walpole’s boy shouldn’t have a sort of half-holiday out in the country, and enjoy his youth. ”

“ Nothing will give us greater pleasure. Allowing for the habitual enthusiasm of our northern neighbor, and for the well-known chaste aridity of Mendocino in respect of female beauty, we have no doubt that Miss Nina Saville is all that the fancy, peculiarly opulent and active even for an advance agent, of Mr. Kilburn has painted her, and is quite such a vision of youth, beauty, and artistic phenomenality as will make the stars of Paris and Illinois pale their ineffectual fires. ”

“ So he told her all about it, and how whenever he went to Salem the two ghosts interfered, and gave dark séances and manifested and materialized and made the place absolutely impossible. Kitty, she listened in silence, and Eliphalet, he thought she had changed her mind. But she hadn’t done anything of the kind.”
“Just like a man—to think she was going to,” remarked Baby Van Rensselaer.
“She just told him she could not bear ghosts herself, but she would not marry a man who was afraid of them.”
“Just like a girl—to be so inconsistent,” remarked Dear Jones. ”

“ Overhead was the full glory of a sky which made one believe that there never was such a thing as a cloud. And they sped along over the sea of water in a sea of light. Just then there came from the depths under the cabin the rise and fall of a measured, mocking melody, high and clear as the notes of a lark.
Baby Van Rensselaer: Why, that must be a bird whistling—only birds don’t whistle “Amaryllis.”
Dear Jones: ’Tisn’t a bird—it’s an engineer.
Baby Van Rensselaer: An engineer?
Dear Jones: A grimy engineer. Quite a pathetic story, too. Some of the Sag Harbor people took him up as a boy. ”

“ As they ascended to the sequence of rambling rooms cluttered with old furniture, rusty armor, and odds and ends of statuary, in which the modern Jew of Venice sat at the receipt of custom, both Larry Laughton and John Manning had to give their undivided attention to the framing in Italian of their wishes. Shylock himself was a venerable and benevolent person, with a look of wonderful shrewdness and an incomprehensibility of speech, for he spoke the Venetian dialect with a harsh Jewish accent, either of which would have daunted a linguistic veteran. ”

“ Dear Jones: What in the name of the prophet does the Duchess mean by introducing me to More Girls?
Baby Van Rensselaer: I do wish the Duchess wouldn’t insist on tiring me out with slim young men; I never can tell one from the other. ”

“ My head is full of those thoughts which the habit of my life moves me to put on paper, where I can best express them; and yet which must be written for only the friendliest of eyes. It is not the least of my happiness in this life that I have one friend to whom I can unlock my heart as I can to you. ”

“ Miss Rittenhouse had managed the Rittenhouse household and the head of the house of Rittenhouse ever since her mother’s death.
Mr. Walpole really had a team at his disposal. He came from a country where people do not chase foxes, nor substitutes for foxes; but where they know and revere a good trotter. He had speeded many a friend’s horse in training for the county fair. When he came to Sand Hills his soundness in the equine branch of a gentleman’s education had attracted the attention of a horsey Sand-Hiller, who owned a showy team with a record of 2.37. ”

“ As she took her seat by the side of the bed she gave Laurence Laughton a look that seemed to peer into his soul. Laurence felt himself quiver under it. It was a look to make a man fearful. Then John Manning, who had moved uneasily as his wife entered, said, “Laurence, can you see any resemblance in my wife to any one you ever saw before?” ”

“ I tell you, Will, that moment was to me like one of those moments of waking that we know in childhood, when we catch the going of a dream too subtly sweet to belong to this earth—a glad vision, gone before our eyes can open wide; not to be figured into any earthly idea, leaving in its passage a joy so high and fine that the poets tell us it is a memory of some heaven from which our young souls are yet fresh. ”

“ I, to whom young men come for advice and encouragement, as to a tried veteran! Strange that I should be thinking of a time when even your true and tireless friendship could not quench a subtle hunger at my heart, a hunger for a more dear and intimate comradeship. ”

“ In the evening, as John Manning sat in a little caffè under the arcades of the Piazza San Marco, sipping a tiny cup of black coffee, Larry entered with a rush of righteous indignation.
“What’s the matter, Larry?” was John Manning’s calm query.
“There’s the devil to pay at home. South Carolina has fired on the flag at Sumter.” ”

“ And you, Larry, you must not stay here. The air is fatal. Every breath may be your last. When you have heard what I want, you must be off at once. If you like, you may come up again to the funeral before your leave is up. I saw you had three weeks.”
Laurence Laughton moved uneasily in his chair and swallowed with difficulty. ”

“ And what differentiates our spook—spiritus Americanus—from the ordinary ghost of literature is that it responds to the American sense of humor. Take Irving’s stories, for example. The Headless Horseman, that’s a comic ghost story. And Rip Van Winkle—consider what humor, and what good-humor, there is in the telling of his meeting with the goblin crew of Hendrik Hudson’s men! A still better example of this American way of dealing with legend and mystery is the marvellous tale of the rival ghosts.”
“The rival ghosts?” queried the Duchess and Baby Van Rensselaer together. ”

“ Never again should the old man walk, as to the boy’s eyes he walked now, [77] over the creaking floors, from where the Nine Muses simpered on the walls of the south parlor to where Homer and Plutarch, equally simpering, yet simpering with a difference,—severely simpering,—faced each other across the north room. Horace saw his father stalking on his accustomed round, a sad, familiar figure, tall and bent. ”

“ They must have one more song. Miss Rittenhouse chose “Jeannette and Jeannot,” and when she looked back at him with a delicious coy mischief in her eyes, and sang,—
“There is no one left to love me now,
And you too may forget”—
Horace felt something flaming in his cheeks and choking in his breast, and it was hard for him to keep from snatching those hands from the keys and telling her she knew better.
But he was man enough not to. He controlled himself, and made himself very pleasant to Mrs. Poinsett about not staying to supper, and they set out for the hotel. ”

“ Kilburn is a gentleman unaccustomed to rough-and-tumble encounters, while his adversary has doubtless associated more with pugilists than gentlemen—at least anyone would think so from his actions yesterday. ”

“ Baby Van Rensselaer sent Dear Jones back to inquire into the cause, for they were alone on the broad sea, with only a tantalizing glimpse of New London harbor stretching out welcoming arms of green, with the Groton monument stuck like a huge clothes-pin on the left arm. Dear Jones came back, trying hard to look decently perturbed and gloomy, but with a barbarian joy lighting up his bronzed features.
Baby Van Rensselaer: What is it?
Dear Jones: The machinery is on a dead centre. ”

“ This was Dear Jones’s contribution to the telling of the tale.
“In the second place,” continued Uncle Larry, “it never frightened anybody the first time it appeared. Only on the second visit were the ghost-seers scared; but then they were scared enough for twice, and they rarely mustered up courage enough to risk a third interview. One of the most curious characteristics of this well-meaning spook was that it had no face—or at least that nobody ever saw its face.” ”

“ Before settling down to other work—for he was a man who could not and would not be idle—he had gratified his long desire of taking a turn through the Old World. Larry Laughton had joined him in Holland, where he had been making researches into the family history, and proving to his own satisfaction at least that the New York Mannings, in spite of their English name, had come from Amsterdam to New Amsterdam. ”

“ Eliphalet Duncan used to spend most of his summer vacations at Salem, and the ghost never bothered him at all, for he was the master of the house—much to his disgust, too, because he wanted to see for himself the mysterious tenant at will of his property. ”