Part 1

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please
visit LibriVox dot o. Work Afterward by Edith Wharton read
by Charles Blakemore Afterward, Part one. Oh there is one,

(00:29):
of course, but you'll never know it. The assertion, laughingly
flung out six months earlier in a bright June garden,
came back to Mary Boyne with a new perception of
its significance as she stood in the December dusk waiting
for the lamps to be brought into the library. The
words had been spoken by their friend Alida's stare as

(00:49):
they sat at tea on her lawn at Pangburn, in
reference to the very house of which the library in
question was the central the pivotal feature Mary Boyne and
her husband, in quest of a country place in one
of the southern or southwestern counties, had, on their arrival
in England, carried their problem straight to alid Astaire, who
had successfully solved it in her own case. But it

(01:12):
was not until they had rejected, almost capriciously several practical
and judicious suggestions that she threw out, well, there's lying
in Dorsetshire. It belongs to Hugo's cousins, and you can
get it for a song. The reason she gave for
its being obtainable on these terms, its remoteness from a station,
its lack of electric light, hot water pipes, and other

(01:35):
vulgar necessities were exactly those pleading in its favor, with
two romantic Americans perversely in search of the economic drawbacks
which were associated in their tradition with unusual architectural felicities.
I should never believe I was living in an old
house unless I was thoroughly uncomfortable. Ned Boyne, the more

(01:57):
extravagant of the two, had jocosely insisted the least hint
of convenience would make me think it had been bought
out of an exhibition, with the pieces numbered and set
up again, And they had proceeded to enumerate with humorous
precision their various doubts and demands, refusing to believe that
the house their friend recommended was really tutor until they

(02:17):
learned it had no heating system, or that the village
church was literally in the grounds, until she assured them
of the deplorable uncertainty of the water supply. It's too
uncomfortable to be true. Edward Boyne had continued to exult
as the avowal of each disadvantage was successively wrung from her.

(02:37):
But he had cut short his rhapsody to ask, with
a relapse to distrust, and the ghost you've been concealing
from us the fact that there is no ghost. Mary
at the moment had laughed with him, yet almost with
her laugh, being possessed of several sets of independent perceptions,
had been struck by a note of flatness in Alida's

(02:59):
answer hilarity, Oh, Dorset, you're full of ghosts, you know, yes, yes,
but that won't do. I don't want to have to
drive ten miles to see somebody else's ghost. I want
one of my own. On the premises, is there a
ghost at Lyne, His rejoinder had made a lead a
laugh again, and it was then that she had flung

(03:20):
back tantalizingly. Oh, there is one, of course, but you'll
never know it, never know it, Boyne pulled her up.
But what in the world constitutes a ghost except the
fact of its being known? For one? I can't say.
But that's the story, that there's a ghost, but that
nobody knows it's a ghost, well, not till afterward, at

(03:44):
any rate, till afterward, not till long, long afterward. But
if it's once been identified as an unearthly visitant, why
hasn't its signal mon been handed down in the family?
How is it made managed to preserve its incognito. Alita
could only shake her head, don't ask me, but it has.

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And then suddenly Mary spoke up, as if from cavernous
depths of divination. Suddenly, long afterward, one says to one's self,
that was it. She was startled at the sepulchral sound
with which her question fell on the banter of the
other two, and she saw the shadow of the same
surprise flit across Alita's pupils. I suppose, so one just

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has to wait, Oh, hang, waiting, Ned broke in. Life's
too short for a ghost who could only be enjoyed
in a retrospect. Can't read it better than that, Mary.
But it turned out that in the event, they were
not destined to for within three months of their conversation
with Missus Stare, they were settled at lying and the

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life they had yearned for to the point of planning
it in advance in all its daily to tales had
actually begun for them. It was to sit in the
thick December dusk by just such a wide hooded fireplace,
under just such black oak rafters, with the sense that
beyond the mullioned panes the downs were darkened to a

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deeper solitude. It was for the ultimate indulgence of such
sensations that Mary Boyne, abruptly exiled from New York by
her husband's business, had endured for nearly fourteen years the
sole deadening ugliness of a middle Western town, and that
Boyne had ground on doggedly at his engineering till with

(05:42):
a suddenness that still made her blink. The prodigious windfall
of the Blue star Mine had put them at a
stroke in possession of life and the leisure to taste it.
They had never, for a moment meant their new state
to be one of idleness, but they meant to give
themselves only to harmonious activities. She had her vision of

(06:04):
painting and gardening against a background of gray walls. He
dreamed of the production of his long planned book on
the quote economic basis of culture, And with such absorbing
work ahead, no existence could be too sequestered, they could
not get far enough from the world or plunge deep

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enough into the past. Dorsetshire had attracted them from the
first by an air of remoteness, out of all proportion
with its geographical position. But to the Boyns it was
one of the ever recurring wonders of the whole incredibly
compressed island, a nest of counties. As they put it,

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that for the production of its effects, so little of
a given distance went so far, that so few miles
made a distance, and so short a distance a difference.
It's that Ned had once enthusiastically explained, that gives such
depth to their effects, such relief to their contrasts. They've

(07:06):
been able to lay the butter so thick on every
delicious mouthful. The butter had certainly been laid on thick
at lying The old house, hidden under a shoulder of
the downs, had almost all the finer marks of commerce
with a protracted past. The mere fact that it was
neither large nor exceptional, made it, to the Boynes abound

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the more completely in its special charm, the charm of
having been for centuries a deep, dim reservoir of life.
The life had probably not been of the most vivid
order for long periods. No doubt it had fallen as
noiselessly into the past as the quiet drizzle of autumn
fell hour after hour into the fish pond between the ewes.

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But these backwaters of existence sometimes breed, in their sluggish depths,
strange acuities of emotion, and Mary Boyne had felt from
the first the mysterious stir of intenser memories. The feeling
hath ever been stronger than on this particular afternoon, when
waiting in the library for the lamps to come, she

(08:14):
rose from her seat and stood among the shadows of
the hearth. Her husband had gone off after luncheon for
one of his long tramps on the downs. She had
noticed of late that he preferred to go alone, and
in the tried security of their personal relations, had been
driven to conclude that his book was bothering him, and

(08:34):
that he needed the afternoons to turn over in solitude
the problems left from the morning's work. Certainly, the book
was not going as smoothly as she had thought it would,
and there were lines of perplexity between his eyes such
as had never been there in his engineering days. He
had often then looked fagged to the verge of illness,
but the native demon of worry had never branded his brow.

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Yet the few pages he had so far read to her,
the introduction and a summary of the opening chapter, showed
a firm hold on his subject and an increasing confidence
in his powers. The fact threw her into deeper perplexity,
since now that he had done with business and its
disturbing contingencies, the one other possible source of anxiety was eliminated,

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unless it were his health then, but physically he had
gained since they had come to Dorsetshire, grown robuster, ruddier,
and fresher eyed. Twas only within the last week that
she had felt in him the indefinable change which made
her restless in his absence, and as tongue tied in
his presence, as though it were she who had a

(09:42):
secret to keep from him. The thought that there was
a secret somewhere between them struck her with a sudden
rap of wonder, and she looked about her down the
long room. Can it be the house, she mused? The
room it self might have been full of secrets. They

(10:03):
seemed to be piling themselves up as evening fell, like
the layers and layers of velvet shadow dropping from the
low ceiling, the rows of books, the smoke blurred sculpture
of the hearth. Why, of course the house is haunted,
she reflected the ghost Alida's imperceptible ghost. After figuring largely

(10:29):
in the banter of their first month or two, it
Lying had been gradually left aside as too ineffectual for
imaginative use. Mary had, indeed, as became the tenant of
a haunted house, made the customary inquiries among her rural neighbors.
But beyond a vague they do say so, ma'am, The
villagers had nothing to impart. The elusive specter had apparently

(10:53):
never had sufficient identity for a legend to crystallize about it,
and after a time the boy and had set the
matter down to their profit and loss account, agreeing that
Lying was one of the few houses good enough in
itself to dispense with supernatural enhancements. And I suppose, poor
ineffectual demon, that's why it beats its beautiful wings in

(11:17):
vain in the void, Mary had laughingly concluded, or rather
ned answered, in the same strain, Why amid so much
that's ghostly? It can never affirm its separate existence as
the ghost, and thereupon their invisible housemate had finally dropped
out of their references, which were numerous enough to make

(11:38):
them soon unaware of the loss. Now, as she stood
on the hearth, the subject of their earlier curiosity revived
in her with a new sense of its meaning, a
sense gradually acquired through daily contact with the scene of
the lurking mystery. It was the house itself, of course,

(11:58):
that possessed the ghost seeing faculty, that communed visually but
secretly with its own past. If one could only get
into close enough communion with the house, one might surprise
its secret and acquire the ghost sight on one's own account,
perhaps in his long hours in this very room, where
she never trespassed till the afternoon, her husband had acquired

(12:23):
it already and was silently carrying about the weight of
whatever it had revealed to him. Mary was too well
versed in the code of the spectral world not to
know that one could not talk about the ghosts one saw.
To do so was almost as great a breach of
taste as to name a lady in a club. But

(12:45):
this explanation did not really satisfy her what after all,
except for the fun of the shutter, She reflected, would
he really care for any of their old ghosts? And
thence she was thrown back once more on the fundamental dilemma,
the fact that one's greater or less susceptibility to spectral
influences had no particular bearing on the case, since when

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one did see a ghost, it lying, one did not
know it, not till long afterwards. Alida Staire had said, well,
supposing ned had seen one when they first came, and
had known only within the last week what had happened
to him. More and more, under the spell of the hour,
she threw back her thoughts to the early days of

(13:29):
their tenancy, but at first only to recall a lively
confusion of unpacking, settling, arranging of books, and calling to
each other from remote corners of the house, as treasure
after treasure it revealed itself to them. It was in
this particular connection that she presently recalled a certain soft
afternoon of the previous October, when passing from the first

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rapturous flurry of exploration to a detailed inspection of the
old house, she had pressed, like a novel heroine, a
panel that opened on a flight of corkscrew stairs, leading
to a flat ledge on the roof, the roof which
from below seemed to slope away on all sides, too
abruptly for any but practiced feet to scale. The view

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from this hidden coin was enchanting, and she had flown
down to snatch ned from his papers and give him
the freedom of her discovery. She remembered still, how standing
at her side, he had passed his arm about her
while their gaze flew to the long tossed horizon line
of the Downs, and then dropped contentedly back to trace

(14:41):
the arabesque of yew hedges about the fish pond, and
the shadow of the cedar on the lawn. And now
the other way, he had said, turning her about within
his arm and closely pressed to him, she had absorbed,
like some long, satisfying draft, the picture of the gray
walled court, the squat lions on the gates, and the

(15:02):
lime avenue reaching up to the high road under the Downs.
It was just then, while they gazed and held each other,
that she had felt his arm relax and heard a
sharp low. It made her turn to glance at him distinctly. Yes,
she now recalled that she had seen as she glanced

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a shadow of anxiety of perplexity rather fall across his face,
and following his eyes had beheld the figure of a man,
a man in loose, grayish clothes, as it appeared to her,
who was sauntering down the lime avenue to the court
with a doubtful gait of a stranger who seeks his way.

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Her short sighted eyes had given her but a blurred
impression of slightness and grayishness, with something foreign or at
least unlocal in the cut of the figure or its dress.
But her husband had apparently seen more seen enough to
make him push past her with a hasty weight, and
dashed down the stairs without pausing to give her a hand.

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A slight tendency to dizziness obliged her, after a provisional
clutch at the chimney against which they had been leaning,
to follow him first, more cautiously, and when she had
reached the landing, she paused again for a less definite reason,
leaning over the banister to strain her eyes through the
silence of the brown sun flecked depths. She lingered there

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till somewhere in those depths she heard the closing of
a door. Then mechanically impelled, she went down the shallow
flights of steps till she reached the lower hall. The
front door stood open on the sunlight of the court,
and hall and court were empty. The library door was open, too,

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and after listening in vain for any sound of voices within,
she crossed the threshold and found her husban alone, vaguely
fingering the papers on his desk. He looked up as
if surprised at her entrance, but the shadow of anxiety
had passed from his face, leaving it even as she fancied,
a little brighter and clearer than usual. What was it?

(17:16):
Who was it? She asked? Who? He repeated, with the
surprise still all on his side. The man we saw
coming toward the house. He seemed to reflect the man.
Why I thought I saw Peter as I dashed after
him to say a word about the stable drains, But
he had disappeared before I could get down. Disappeared, but

(17:36):
he seemed to be walking so slowly when we saw him.
Boyne shrugged his shoulders, so I thought, but he must
have got up steam in the interval. What do you
say to our trying to scramble up meldon steep before sunset.
That was all. At the time the occurrence had been

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less than nothing, had indeed been immediately obliterate by the
magic of their first vision from Meldon Steep, a height
which they had dreamed of climbing ever since they had
first seen its bare spine rising above the roof of line. Doubtless,
it was the mere fact of the other incidents having
occurred on the very day of their ascent to Meldon

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that had kept it stored away in the fold of
memory from which it now emerged, For in itself it
had no mark of the portentis At the moment, there
could have been nothing more natural than that Ned should
dash himself from the roof in pursuit of dilatory tradesmen.
Twas the period when they were always on the watch

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for one or the other of the specialists employed about
the place, always lying in wait for them, and rushing
out at them with questions, reproaches, or reminders. And certainly
in the distance the gray figure had looked like Peter's.
Yet now, as she reviewed the scene, she felt her
husband's explanation of it to have been in vaisalidated by

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the look of anxiety on his face. Why had the
familiar appearance of Peter's made him anxious. Why, above all,
if it was of such prime necessity to confer with
him on the subject of the stable drains, had the
failure to find him produced such a look of relief.
Mary could not say that any one of these questions

(19:22):
had occurred to her at the time. Yet from the
promptness with which they now marshaled themselves at her summons,
she had a sense that they must all along have
been there waiting their hour. Two. Weary with her thoughts,

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she moved to the window. The library was now quite dark,
and she was surprised to see how much faint light
the outer world still held as she peered out into it.
Across the court, a figure shaped itself far down the
perspect active of bare limes. It looked a mere blot
of deeper gray in the grayness, and for an instant

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as it moved toward her, her heart thumped to the
thought it's the ghost. She had time, in that long
instant to feel suddenly that the man of whom two
months earlier she had had a distant vision from the roof,
was now at his predestined hour, about to reveal himself
as not having been Peter's, and her spirit sank under

(20:31):
the impending fear of the disclosure. But almost with the
next tick of the clock, the figure, gaining substance and character,
showed itself, even to her weak sight, as her husband's,
and she turned to meet him as he entered, with
the confession of her folly. It's really too absurd, she
laughed up. But I never can remember remember what, Boyne questioned,

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as they drew together, that when one sees the lion ghost,
one never knows it. Her hand was on his sleeve,
and he kept it there, but with no response in
his gesture or in the lines of his preoccupied face.
Did you think you'd seen it? He asked, after an
appreciable interval. Why I actually took you for it, my dear,

(21:18):
in my mad determination to spot it me Just now?
His arm dropped away, and he turned from her with
a faint echo of her laugh. Really, dearest, you'd better
give it up if that's the best you can do. Oh, yes,
I give it up, have you, she asked, turning round

(21:40):
on him. Abruptly, the parlor maid had entered with letters
and a lamp, and the light struck up into Boyne's face.
As he bent above the tray she presented, have you,
Mary perversely insisted, when the servant had disappeared on her
errand of illumination, and by what he rejoined absently, the

(22:02):
light bringing out the sharp stamp of worry between his
brows as he turned over the letters, given up trying
to see the ghost. Her heart beat a little at
the experiment she was making. Her husband, laying his letters aside,
moved away into the shadow of the hearth. I never tried,

(22:23):
he said, tearing open the wrapper of a newspaper. Well,
of course, Mary persisted. The exasperating thing is that there's
no use trying, since one can't be sure till so long. Afterward,
he was unfolding the paper as if he had hardly
heard her. But after a pause during which the sheets

(22:46):
rustled spasmodically between his hands, he looked up to ask,
have you any idea? How long? Mary had sunk into
a low chair beside the fireplace. From her seat, she
glanced over, startled at her husband's profile, which was projected
against the circle of lamp light. No, none, have you,

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she retorted, repeating her former phrase with an added stress
of intention. Boyne crumpled the paper into a bunch, and
then inconsequently turned back with it toward the lamp. Lord
no I only meant, he exclaimed, with a faint tinge

(23:30):
of impatience. Is there any legend, any tradition as to that?
Not that I know of, she answered. But the impulse
to add what makes you ask was checked by the
reappearance of the parlor maid with tea and a second lamp.
With the dispersal of shadows, and the repetition of the
daily domestic office, Mary Boyne felt herself less oppressed by

(23:54):
that sense of something mutely imminent which had darkened her afternoon.
For a few moments, she gave herself to the details
of her task, and when she looked up from it,
she was struck to the point of bewilderment by the
change in her husband's face. He had seated himself near
the farther lamp and was absorbed in the perusal of

(24:17):
his letters. But was it something he had found in them,
or merely the shifting of her own point of view
that had restored his features to their normal aspect. The
longer she looked, the more definitely the change affirmed itself.
The lines of tension had vanished, and such traces of
fatigue as lingered were of the kind easily attributable to

(24:38):
steady mental effort. He glanced up, as if drawn by
her gaze, and met her eyes with a smile. I'm
dying for my tea, you know. And here's a letter
for you, he said. She took the letter he held
out in exchange for the cup she proffered him, and,
returning to her seat, broke the seal with the languid

(24:59):
gesture of the rea whose interests are all enclosed in
the circle of one cherished presence. Her next conscious motion
was that of starting to her feet, the letter falling
to them as she rose, while she held out to
her husband a newspaper clipping ned what's this? What does

(25:19):
it mean? He had risen at the same instant, almost
as if hearing her cry before she uttered it, and
for a perceptible space of time he and she studied
each other like adversaries, watching for an advantage, across the
space between her chair and his desk. What's what You
fairly made me jump, Boyne said, at length, moving toward

(25:42):
her with a sudden, half exasperated laugh. The shadow of
apprehension was on his face again, not now a look
of fixed foreboding, but a shifting vigilance of lips and
eyes that gave her the sense of his feeling himself
invisibly surrounded. Her hand shook so that she could hardly
give him the clipping this article from the Walkashaw Sentinel

(26:07):
that a man named Elwell has brought suit against you,
that there was something wrong about the Blue Star mind.
I can't understand more than half. They continued to face
each other as she spoke, and to her astonishment, she
saw that her words had the almost immediate effect of
dissipating the strange watchfulness of his look. Oh that he

(26:31):
glanced down the printed slip and then folded it with
the gesture of one who handles something harmless and familiar.
What's the matter with you this afternoon, Mary? I thought
you'd got bad news. She stood before him, with her
undefinable terror, subsiding slowly under the reassurance of his tone.

(26:51):
You knew about this, then, it's all right. Certainly I
knew about it, and it's all right. But what is it?
I don't understand. What does this man accuse you of?
Pretty nearly every crime in the calendar Boynett tossed the
clipping down and thrown himself into an armchair near the fire.
Do you want to hear the story? It's not particularly

(27:14):
interesting just to squabble over interests in the Blue Star.
But who is this Elwill? I don't know the name. Oh,
he's a fellow I put into it, gave my hand up.
I told you all about him at the time. I
dare say, I must have forgotten. Vainly she strained back
among her memories. But if you helped him, why does

(27:36):
he make this return. Probably some shyster lawyer got hold
of him and talked him over. It's all rather technical
and complicated. I thought that kind of thing bored you.
His wife felt a sting of compunction. Theoretically, she deprecated
the American wife's detachment from her husband's professional interests, but

(28:00):
in practice she had always found it difficult to fix
her attention on Boyne's report of the transactions in which
his varied interests involved him. Besides, she had felt during
their years of exile that in a community where the
amenities of living could be obtained only at the cost
of efforts as arduous as her husband's professional labors, such

(28:22):
brief leisure, as he and she could command, should be
used as an escape from immediate preoccupations, a flight to
the life they had always dreamed of living once or twice.
Now that this new life had actually drawn its magic
circle about them, she had asked herself if she had
done right. But hitherto such conjectures had been no more

(28:46):
than the retrospective excursions of an active fancy. Now, for
the first time, it startled her a little to find
how little she knew of the material foundation on which
her happiness was built. She glace said her husband, and
was again reassured by the composure of his face. Yet
she felt the need of more definite grounds for her reassurance.

(29:11):
But doesn't this suit worry you? Why have you never
spoken to me about it? He answered both questions at once.
I didn't speak of it at first because it did
worry me, annoyed me rather. But it's all ancient history. Now.
Your correspondent must have got hold of a back number
of the Sentinel. She felt a quick thrill of relief.

(29:35):
You mean it's over. He's lost his case. There was
a just perceptible delay in Boyne's reply. The suit's been withdrawn.
That's all. But she persisted, as if to exonerate herself
from the inward charge of being too easily put off.

(29:55):
Withdrawn it because he saw he had no chance. Oh,
he had no chance, Boyne answered. She was still struggling
with a dimly felt perplexity at the back of her thoughts.
How long ago was it? Withdrawn? He paused, as if
with a slight return to his former uncertainty. I've just

(30:17):
had the news now, but I've been expecting it just
now in one of your letters, Yes, in one of
my letters. She made no answer, and was aware only
after a short interval of waiting that he had risen
and strolling across the room, had placed himself on the
sofa at her side. She felt him, as he did so,

(30:40):
pass an arm about her. She felt his hand seek
hers and clasp it, and turning slowly, drawn by the
warmth of his cheek, she met his smiling eyes. It's
all right, it's all right, she questioned, through the flood
of her dissolving doubts. And I give you my word
was never righter, he laughed back at her, holding her close.

(31:08):
End of Part one