Questionable Shapes. William Dean Howells

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СКАЧАТЬ he asked, coldly.

      “Last summer.”

      “Was it after dark?”

      “Very much after. It was at day-break.”

      “Oh! You were alone?”

      “Quite.”

      “You made sure you were not dreaming?”

      “I made sure of that, instantly. I was not awakened by the apparition. I was already fully awake.”

      “Had your mind been running on anything of the kind?”

      “Nothing could have been farther from it. I was thinking what a very long while it would be till breakfast.” This was not true as to the order of the fact; but Hewson could not keep himself from saying it, and it made a laugh and created a diversion in his favor.

      “How long did it seem to last?”

      “The vision? That was very curious. The whole affair was quite achronic, as I may say. The figure was there and it was not there.”

      “It vanished suddenly?”

      “I can’t say it vanished at all. It ought still to be there. Have you ever returned to a place where you had always been wrong as to the points of the compass, and found yourself right up to a certain moment as you approached, and then without any apparent change, found yourself perfectly wrong again? The figure was not there, and it was there, and then it was not there.”

      “I think I see what you mean,” said the psychologist, warily. “The evanescence was subjective.”

      “Altogether. But so was the apparescence.”

      “Ah!” said Wanhope. “You hadn’t any headache?”

      “Not the least.”

      “Ah!” The psychologist desisted with the effect of letting the defence take the witness.

      A general dissatisfaction diffused itself, and Hewson felt it; but he disdained to do anything to appease it. He remained silent for that appreciable time which elapsed before his host said, almost compassionately, “Won’t you tell us all about it, Mr. Hewson.”

      The guests, all but Miss Hernshaw, seemed to return to their impartial frame, with a leaning in Hewson’s favor, such as the court-room feels when the accused is about to testify in his own behalf; the listeners cannot help wishing him well, though they may have their own opinions of his guilt.

      “Why, there _isn’t_ any ‘all-about-it,’” said Hewson. “The whole thing has been stated as to the circumstances and conditions.” He could see the baffled greed in the eyes of those who were hungering for a morsel of the marvellous, and he made it as meagre as he could. He had now no temptation to exaggerate the simple fact, and he hurried it out in the fewest possible words.

      VIII.

      The general disappointment was evident in the moment of waiting which followed upon his almost contemptuous ending. His audience some of them took their cue from his own ironical manner, and joked; others looked as if they had been trifled with. The psychologist said, “Curious.” He did not go back to his position that belief in ghosts should follow from seeing a man who had seen one; he seemed rather annoyed by the encounter. The talk took another turn and distributed itself again between contiguous persons for the brief time that elapsed before the women were to leave the men to their coffee and cigars.

      When their hostess rose Hewson offered his arm to Miss Hernshaw. She had not spoken to him since he had told the story of his apparition. Now she said in an undertone so impassioned that every vibration from her voice shook his heart, “If I were you, I would never tell that story again!” and she pressed his arm with unconscious intensity, while she looked away from him.

      “You don’t believe it happened?” he returned.

      “It did.”

      “Of course it happened! Why shouldn’t I believe that? But that’s the very reason why I wouldn’t have told it. If it happened, it was something sacred--awful! Oh, I don’t see how you could bear to speak of it at a dinner, when people were all torpid with--”

      She stopped breathlessly, with a break in her voice that sounded just short of a sob.

      “Well, I’m sufficiently ashamed of doing it, and not for the first time,” he said, in sullen discontent with himself. “And I’ve been properly punished. You can’t think how sick it makes me to realize what a detestable sensation I was seeking.”

      She did not heed what he was saying. “Was it that morning at St. Johnswort when you got up so early, and went for a cup of coffee at the inn?”

      “Yes.”

      “I thought so! I could follow every instant of it; I could see just how it was. If such a thing had happened to me, I would have died before I spoke of it at such a time as this. Oh, _why_ do you suppose it happened to you?” the girl grieved.

      “Me, of all men?” said Hewson, with a self-contemptuous smile.

      “I thought you were different,” she said absently; then abruptly: “What are you standing here talking to me so long for? You must go back! All the men have gone back,” and Hewson perceived that they had arrived in the drawing-room, and were conspicuously parleying in the face of a dozen interested women witnesses.

      In the dining-room he took his way toward a vacant place at the table near his host, who was saying behind his cigar to another old fellow: “I used to know her mother; she was rather original too; but nothing to this girl. I don’t envy Mrs. Rock her job.”

      “I don’t know what the pay of a chaperon is, but I suppose Hernshaw can make it worth her while, if he’s like the rest out there,” said the other old fellow. “I imagine he’s somewhere in his millions.”

      The host held up one of his fingers. “Is that all? I thought more. Mines?”

      “Cattle. Ah, Mr. Hewson,” said the host, turning to welcome him to the chair on his other side. “Have a cigar. That was a strong story you gave us. It had a good fault, though. It was too short.”

      IX.

      Hewson had begun now to feel a keen, persistent, painful sympathy for the apparition itself as for some one whose confidence had been abused; and this feeling was none the less, but all the more, poignant because it was he himself who was guilty towards it. He pitied it in a sort as if it had been the victim of a wrong more shocking perhaps for the want of taste in it than for any real turpitude. This was a quality of the event not without a strange consolation. In arraying him on the side of the apparition, it antagonized him with what he had done, and enabled him to renounce and disown it.

      From the night of that dinner, Hewson did not again tell the story of his apparition, though the opportunities to do so now sought him as constantly as he had formerly sought them. They offered him a fresh temptation through the different perversions of the fact that had got commonly abroad, but he resisted this temptation, and let the perversions, sometimes annoyingly, sometimes СКАЧАТЬ