Philip Van Doren Stern (ed) (120 page)

Lithway,
then,
was
perfectly
idle.
His
complete
lack
of
the
executive
gift
made
him
an
incomparable
host.
He
had
been
in
the
house three
years,
and
I
was
visiting
him
there
for
perhaps
the
third
time, when
he
told
me
that
it
was
haunted.
He
didn't
seem
inclined
to
give details,
and,
above
all,
didn't
seem
inclined
to
be
worried.
He
sat
up very
late
always,
and
preferably
alone,
a
fact
that
in
itself
proved
that he
was
not
nervous.
As
I
said,
I
had
never
been
interested
in
ghosts, and
the
newness
of
the
house
robbed
fear
of
all
seriousness.
Ghosts batten
on
legend
and
decay.
There
wasn't
any
legend,
and
the
house was
almost
shockingly
clean.
When
he
told
me
of
the
ghost,
then,
I forbore
to
ask
for
any
more
information
than
he,
of
his
own
volition,
gave
me.
If
he
had
wanted
advice
or
assistance,
he
would,
of course,
have
said
so.
The
servants
seemed
utterly
unaware
of
anything
queer,
and
servants
leave
a
haunted
house
as
rats
a
sinking
ship. It
really
did
not
seem
worth
inquiring
into.
I
referred
occasionally
to Lithway's
ghost
as
I
might
have
done
to
a
Syracusan
coin
which
I should
know
him
proud
to
possess
but
loath
to
show.

On
my
return
from
Yucatan,
one
early
spring,
Lithway
welcomed me
as
usual.
He
seemed
lazier
than
ever,
and
I
noticed
that
he
had moved
his
books
down
from
a
second-story
to
a
ground-floor
room. He
slept
outdoors
summer
and
winter,
and
he
had
an
outside
stairway
built
to
lead
from
his
library
up
to
the
sleeping-porch.
A
door from
the
sleeping-porch
led
straight
into
his
dressing-room.
I
laughed at
his
arrangements
a
little.

"You live on this side of the house
entirely now—cut off, actually, from the other side. What is the matter with
the east?"

He pointed out to me that the dining-room and
the billiard-room were on the eastern side and that he never shunned them.
"It's just a notion," he said. "Mrs. Jayne" (the
housekeeper) "sleeps on the second floor, and I don't like to wake her
when I go up at three in the morning. She is a light sleeper."

I laughed outright. "Lithway, you're getting to be an old
maid."

It was natural that I should dispose my
effects in the rooms least likely to be used by Lithway. I took over his
discarded up-stairs study, and, with a bedroom next door, was very comfortable.
He assured me that he had no reason to suppose I should ever be disturbed in
either room. Moving his own things, he said, had been purely a precautionary
measure in behalf of Mrs. Jayne. Curiously enough, I was perfectly sure that
his first statement was absolutely true and his second absolutely false. Only
the first one, however, seemed to be really my affair. I could hardly complain.

Lithway did seem changed; but I have such an involuntary trick of
comparing my rediscovered friends with the human beings I have most recently
been seeing that I did not take the change too seriously. He was perfectly
unlike the Yucatan Indians; but, on reflection, why shouldn't he be, I asked
myself. Probably he had always been just like that. I couldn't prove that he
hadn't. Yet I did think there was something back of his listlessness other
than mere prolonged grief for his wife. Occasionally, I confess, I thought
about the ghost in this connection.

One morning I was leaving my sitting-room to
go down to Lithway's library. The door of the room faced the staircase to the
third story, and as I came out I could always see, directly opposite and above
me, a line of white banisters that ran along the narrow third-story hall.
Mechanically, this time, I looked up and saw—I need not say, to my surprise—a
burly negro leaning over the rail looking down at me. The servants were all
white, and the man had, besides, a very definite look of not belonging there.
He didn't, in any way, fit into his background. I ran up the stairs to
investigate. When I got just beneath him, he bent over towards me with a
malicious gesture. All I saw, for an instant, was a naked brown arm holding up
a curious jagged knife. The edge caught the little light there was in the dim
hall
as
he
struck
at
me.
I
hit
back,
but
he
had
gone
before
I
reached him—simply
ceased
to
be.
There
was
no
Cheshire-cat
vanishing
process.
I
was
staring
again
into
the
dim
hall,
over
the
white
banisters. There
were
no
rooms
on
that
side
of
the
hall,
and
consequently
no doors.

A
light
broke
in
on
me.
I
went
down-stairs
to
Lithway.
"I've
seen your
ghost,"
I
said
bluntly.

What
seemed
to
be
a
great
relief
relaxed
his
features.
"You
have! And
isn't
she
extraordinary?"