American fiction -- 20th century; Short stories, American
My weak mind wandered in and out among these visions and conjectures,
and the longer I lived with them the more convinced I became that
something _which had been Mary Pask_ had talked with me that night.... I
made up my mind, when I was up again, to drive back to the place (in
broad daylight, this time), to hunt out the grave in the garden—that
“shady corner where the sun never bothers one”—and appease the poor
ghost with a few flowers. But the doctors decided otherwise; and perhaps
my weak will unknowingly abetted them. At any rate, I yielded to their
insistence that I should be driven straight from my hotel to the train
for Paris, and thence transshipped, like a piece of luggage, to the
Swiss sanatorium they had in view for me. Of course I meant to come back
when I was patched up again ... and meanwhile, more and more tenderly,
but more intermittently, my thoughts went back from my snow-mountain to
that wailing autumn night above the _Baie des Trépassés_, and the
revelation of the dead Mary Pask who was so much more real to me than
ever the living one had been.
IV
After all, why should I tell Grace Bridgeworth—ever? I had had a glimpse
of things that were really no business of hers. If the revelation had
been vouchsafed to me, ought I not to bury it in those deepest depths
where the inexplicable and the unforgettable sleep together? And
besides, what interest could there be to a woman like Grace in a tale
she could neither understand nor believe in? She would just set me down
as “queer”—and enough people had done that already. My first object,
when I finally did get back to New York, was to convince everybody of my
complete return to mental and physical soundness; and into this scheme
of evidence my experience with Mary Pask did not seem to fit. All things
considered, I would hold my tongue.
But after a while the thought of the grave began to trouble me. I
wondered if Grace had ever had a proper grave-stone put on it. The queer
neglected look of the house gave me the idea that perhaps she had done
nothing—had brushed the whole matter aside, to be attended to when she
next went abroad. “Grace forgets,” I heard the poor ghost quaver.... No,
decidedly, there could be no harm in putting (tactfully) just that one
question about the care of the grave; the more so as I was beginning to
reproach myself for not having gone back to see with my own eyes how it
was kept....
Grace and Horace welcomed me with all their old friendliness, and I soon
slipped into the habit of dropping in on them for a meal when I thought
they were likely to be alone. Nevertheless my opportunity didn’t come at
once—I had to wait for some weeks. And then one evening, when Horace was
dining out and I sat alone with Grace, my glance lit on a photograph of
her sister—an old faded photograph which seemed to meet my eyes
reproachfully.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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