Harlan had not sold Mrs. Savage’s old house, but had moved into it, and kept as precise a routine there as she had kept, and with the same servants. He had two bedrooms upstairs made into a library, but changed nothing on the lower floor; and often the old lady seemed still to be there in authority. At twilight, before Nimbus lit the electric table lamp in the “south front parlour,” the room to which she had always descended from her afternoon nap, it was not difficult to imagine that she was sitting in the stiff chair beside the plate-glass window. Of course Nimbus believed that he saw her there when he came in to light the lamp; and he often mumbled to her—always upon the same theme. He was grateful for the one hundred and thirty-five dollars she had left him, but considered the sum inadequate.
“No’m, indeed,” he said to the figure he saw in the stiff chair. “I thank you kindly, but didn’ I used you right all my days? How much it cost you slip down ten hunderd thirty-five on that paper, ’stead of one hunderd thirty-five? You ain’t got it, are you? Ain’t doin’ you no good, do it? No’m, indeedy! ’Tain’t no use you bein’ sorry, neither. Make all the fuss you want to; you too late; nobody ain’t goin’ pay no ’tention to you!”
And in the kitchen he would discuss the apparition with his fourth wife, the fat cook, Myrtle. “Look to me like she can’t keep away,” he would say. “Set there same as ever. Set up straight in that stiff chair. See her plain as I see you, till I git that lamp lit.”
“Landy me, Nimbus, I wouldn’ go in that room unlessen the light bright as day if you give me trottin’ horse an’ gole harniss! How you keep from hollerin’?”
At this the tall, thin old fellow would laugh without making a sound; deep wrinkles in the design of half of a symmetrical cobweb appearing on each side of his face. Some profoundly interior secret of his might have been betrayed, it seemed, if he had allowed his merriment to become vocal; and this noiseless laugh of his awed his wife in much the same way, no doubt, that the laugh of a jungle witch-doctor ancestor of his had awed wives not unlike Myrtle. “She ain’t goin’ bother me ner you,” he explained. “She ain’t settin’ there ’count o’ me ner you. She settin’ there ’cause she so mad.”
“Who? Who she mad at?”
“Mad at somep’m!” Nimbus would say, and, becoming less uncomfortably mystic might allow a human chuckle to escape him. “Set there mad long as she want to; ’tain’t goin’ do her no good. She ain’t fixed to make no changes now!”
The new owner lived in the old house almost as quietly as Mrs. Savage, in the visions of Nimbus, went on living there. Harlan had several times thought of going to Italy, but the idea never culminated in action.
“I wanted to come, though,” he told Martha, as they sat on her veranda that hot morning, the day after her return. “I wanted to more than I ever wanted to do anything else. You see I’ve almost stopped going to the office; I just dangle about there sometimes to please father, but I don’t care to practise law. It’s a silly way of spending one’s life after all, fighting the sordid disputes of squabbling people. There was really nothing to keep me here.”
She did not alter her attitude, but still looked out upon the old familiar unfamiliar scene from beneath her sheltering curved fingers. “If you wanted to come, why didn’t you?”