“Do you know, Richard, I have an idea that Mrs. Wace is not really a nice woman?”
I, too, had broken Mrs. Wace’s bread, but I did not hesitate. “I think you are undoubtedly right, Letitia.”
It was the only thing I have ever, until now, been able to do to avenge Filippo Upcher. Even when I learned (I always had an arrangement by which I should learn, if it occurred) of Mrs. Floyd’s death, I could still do nothing. There was poor Evie, who never knew, and who, as I say, could not have borne it.
I shall be much blamed by many people, no doubt, for having promised Rachel Upcher what she asked. I can only say that any one else, in my place, would have done the same. They were best kept apart: I don’t know how else to put it. I shall be blamed, too, for not seizing my late, my twelfth-hour opportunity to eulogize Filippo Upcher—for not, at least, trying to explain him. There would be no point in trying to account for what happened by characterizing Filippo. Nothing could account for such hatred: it was simply a great natural fact. They combined, like chemical agents, to that monstrous result. Each was, to the other, poison. I tell the truth now because no one has ever doubted Upcher’s guilt, and it is only common fairness that he should be cleared. Why should I, for that reason, weave flatteries about him? He did not murder his wife; but that fact has not made it any easier to call him “Filippo,” which I have faithfully done since I encountered Rachel Upcher in southern California. If truth is the order of the day, let me say the other thing that for years I have not been at liberty to say: he was a frightful bounder.
ON THE STAIRCASE
Probably the least wise way to begin a ghoststory is to say that one does not believe in ghosts. It suggests that one has never seen the real article. Perhaps, in one sense, I never have; yet I am tempted to set down a few facts that I have never turned over to the Society for Psychical Research or discussed at my club. The fact is that I had ingeniously forgotten them until I saw Harry Medway, the specialist—my old classmate—a few years ago. I say “forgotten”; of course, I had not forgotten them, but, in order to carry on the business of life, I had managed to record them, as it were, in sympathetic ink. After I heard what Harry Medway had to say, I took out the loose sheets and turned them to the fire. Then the writing came out strong and clear again—letter by letter, line by line, as fatefully as Belshazzar’s “immortal postscript.” Did I say that I do not believe in ghosts? Well—I am getting toward the end, and a few inconsistencies may be forgiven to one who is not far from discoveries that will certainly be inconsistent with much that we have learned by heart in this interesting world. Perhaps it will be pardoned me as a last flicker of moribund pride if I say that in my younger days I was a crack shot, and to the best of my belief never refused a bet or a drink or an adventure. I do not remember ever having been afraid of a human being; and yet I have known fear. There are weeks, still, when I live in a bath of it. I think I will amend my first statement, and say instead that I do not believe in any ghosts except my own—oh, and in Wender’s and Lithway’s, of course.
Some people still remember Lithway for the sake of his charm. He never achieved anything, so far as I know, except his own delightful personality. He was a classmate of mine, and we saw a great deal of each other both in and after college—until he married, indeed. His marriage coincided with my own appointment to a small diplomatic post in the East; and by the time that I had served my apprenticeship, come into my property, resigned from the service, and returned to America, Lithway’s wife had suddenly and tragically died. I had never seen her but once—on her wedding-day—but I had reason to believe that Lithway had every right to be as inconsolable as he was. If he had ever had any ambition in his own profession, which was law, he lost it all when he lost her. He retired to the suburban country, where he bought a new house that had just been put up. He was its first tenant, I remember. That fact, later, grew to seem important. There he relapsed into a semi-populated solitude, with a few visitors, a great many books, and an inordinate amount of tobacco. These details I gathered from Wender in town, while I was adjusting my affairs.
Never had an inheritance come so pat as mine. There were all sorts of places I wanted to go to, and now I had money enough to do it. The wanderlust had nearly eaten my heart out during the years when I had kicked my heels in that third-rate legation. I wanted to see Lithway, but a dozen minor catastrophes prevented us from meeting during those breathless weeks, and as soon as I could I positively had to be off. Youth is like that. So that, although Lithway’s bereavement had been very recent, at the time when I was in America settling my affairs and drawing the first instalment of my beautiful income—there is no beauty like that of unearned increment—I did not see him until he had been a widower for more than two years.