WHEN GHOSTS ARISE

MARCIA HADDON’S lawyers wrote with greater and greater insistence from New York, asking her return to care for the matters of the estate of James Haddon, but she still shrank from the thought of going back to the old associations. A strange apathy encompassed her, a leaden indifference to life, as though all were ended for her as well as for the unfortunate lying yonder on the hill. She found nothing in life to interest her, to offer her any hope, to excite in her any ambition. “I’m useless, useless!” said she to herself more than once. She held her own life in review now, day after day, feeling herself unworthy and forsaken, herself too merciless a critic of herself.

Joslin she saw frequently. His visits were quiet, unobtrusive, almost apologetic. He was very sad, and always taciturn, but she often looked forward to his coming with something to ask him, something to discuss.

“I feel so worthless here!” she broke out, suddenly, to him one evening, as she sat in her chair, looking out across the blue hills of the valley below them. “It’s time for me to be going home, I suppose—— But I don’t think there ever was a woman so worthless in all the world, nor one so much alone. I don’t want to go back. Granny Williams——”

He sat silent, looking across the forests as they lay in the twilight.

“Some day,” he said slowly, after a time, “will you ride out with me, Mrs. Haddon, into these hills, with one of our women here? I’ll show you things, Ma’am, you never thought could exist in all the world.

“Do you know what I’ve been doing, Ma’am?” he went on. “I mean since I came back here? At night, when I have time, I’m teaching school—I’ve begun already.”

He smiled at her with his wide, pleasant smile. “My first scholar, Ma’am, is old Absalom Gannt. He’s the man that killed my father—or made him kill himself. He’s the leader of the Gannt faction. There’s been war between the Gannts and Joslins long as anybody can remember in these mountains. Well, Absalom was my first scholar!”

She only looked at him quietly. “What made him come?” said she at length.

“You measure your own ignorance of these people by that question,” said he. “I’ve got a night class of twenty people, every one of them over forty-five—men and women both—some women with babies in their arms. They don’t know how to read or write. They’re learning their letters, Ma’am—like little children! What’s the difference whether we’re happy or not? It’s no consequence if we’ve got something to do. Don’t you think there’s much to be done, here?”

“Children?” said Marcia Haddon vaguely—“Old Granny Williams said——”

“I had two children. I was glad they died. But I’m trying to make ways for other children to grow up fit to live.”

She sat for a long time, her hands idly in her lap, her pale face turned steadily out toward the enigma of these hills.

“Spartan!” she exclaimed. “All Spartans! And I had so much! They tell me my husband’s estate will be about two million dollars.”

David Joslin smiled. “It must be fine,” said he, “to know where your next meal’s going to come from. I’ve hardly ever known that.”

“Granny Williams said—— You see, I have no children of my own. And here—why, here are hundreds waiting.”

He was looking far over the hills.

“Do you suppose,” she went on after a time; as he remained silent, “do you suppose if I built another building up on the hill, with a part of this money he made out of this very country—if I built one building for girls, dormitories, you know, or class rooms—big enough for two or three hundred children—would there be that many?”

He smiled. “Many thousands,” he replied. “They’d come from fifty miles around, a hundred miles—everyone begging, like these old people in my night classes, to learn how to read and write. They want knowledge, Ma’am! They want up—they want out! If you could help in that—I don’t think you’d feel ‘worthless,’ ever again! Whether you ever did that or not, you mustn’t ever say that word again. At least, you’ve given one man, once hopeless, his hope and his chance—and his dreams, we’ll say. I’ve had quite some dreams, you see.”

“Fifteen or twenty thousand dollars would go quite a way toward making a building of that sort?”

He smiled.

“There’s not been fifty dollars put into our building, I suppose, Ma’am,” said he. “Twenty thousand dollars—that’s more money than there is in all this county. But there’s twenty thousand millions in sight of where we sit.”

She turned to him contritely—“It’s plain enough what my husband and his Company wanted to do with these people—they wanted to steal away their very birthright, before they were wise enough to know its value. It wouldn’t be charity for me—it wouldn’t be even a gift. It wouldn’t be a fraction of what you have owing to you from me and mine.

“And it might be done too,” she went on shrewdly. “With the Johnston and Bulkley and Oddingham holdings, my husband’s estate would pretty nearly control the Land Company’s affairs—they would vote with me, I’m sure. So maybe, you see”—smiling for almost the first time in all these weeks—“it was in my destiny to come here?”

“It may have been,” said David Joslin simply.

She ran on eagerly now. “We’ll have a church up there too, some time. Couldn’t you be the preacher some time, Mr. Joslin? And of course you’ll be president of the college. Listen at me talking! I’m just like a child.

“But you don’t answer,” she said, looking at him keenly. He was staring out steadily. Gaunt, with sunken eyes and prominent cheekbones, worn and drawn by the long hours of labor bodily and mental, David Joslin was not a handsome man, nor did even physical well-being seem vouchsafed to him now. He was sad, very sad. It seemed to her she had never seen a face so sad as his.

“Of course,” she reiterated, “you’ll be the president. You’ll have to preach—no one else could.”

He turned to her and half raised a hand. “You mustn’t,” said he. “That’s my school—yes. But I can’t be its president.”

“Why? What do you mean, Mr. Joslin?”

“You don’t understand. No, I reckon not.”

“No.” She shook her head. “You start a thing and don’t finish it—is that the plan? And this the very thing in all your life which outweighed everything else? And you’ve got me to thinking it was a wonderful thing that you had planned. You’d drop it now?”

She was resting her chin on her hands, now white and thin, supported on Granny Williams’ cane. Now she lifted her head and half turned away. He caught the significance of the act, and it made his gaunt face paler.

“Well,” replied he quietly, “now perhaps you can see why I’m not happy.”

She looked at him so deeply regretful that he pulled together with a resolve obviously painful.

“You don’t know much about me. That’s of no importance. But if you are interested in my school and my people, then I do become important in one way. Shall I have to tell you about myself?”

“Go on,” said she, nodding. “Yes.”

So then, simply, baldly, unsparing of himself, he did go on and tell her about himself and his life—the hopelessness of it, the narrowness, the meagerness, the despair of it all, the tenfold shackles of misery and ignorance which had held him and all his so long. Then he told her of his own marriage; and of the end of it.

“I don’t wonder you are unhappy,” said she slowly at last. “But still I don’t know why you should not go on with your school as you planned.”

“I reckon I’ll have to tell you all the rest,” said David Joslin desperately after a time. “I didn’t think I ever could.”

“Why not?” she asked simply.

“You want to know what is my stumbling block? I’ll tell you—it was a woman.”

“You mean your wife? But I don’t think I ought to discuss that.” She half rose.

But she could not stop him now as he went on stumblingly, unalterably.

“Oh, no! Not that woman—my wife,” said he. “Another.”

“You needn’t tell me anything more, I think,” said she. “Are you going to tell me just some common story about yourself and some woman?”

“That’s just precisely what I’m going to do!” said he. “I’m going to kill all the respect for me you’ve ever had. Then you’ll know why I can’t be president of my own college. I’ll have to go through fire before I can. I’m not good enough. Now then you can see.”

“Who was she? When——?”

“You ought to know, certainly. It was your husband——”

She sat up suddenly, her eyes flashing. “That woman——!”

“So then you knew her?”

“Why should I not?” rejoined Marcia Haddon, now all aflame. “Did she not ruin my married life, as much of it as there was to ruin? Didn’t all the town know about her, and him—and me? Of all the women in the world I ought to hate, that’s the one!”

“And of all the men in the world you will hate, I’m the one,” said David Joslin. “But I can’t lie to you now. My conscience made me a coward for a while, but it’s my way to go on through.”

“How could you have known that woman? When did you meet?”

“Twice,” said David Joslin. “Once was at the dinner of the Company; the next in the morning at her own rooms. That was twice, in New York.”

She looked at him, utter scorn upon her face. Her cheeks at last had color.

“Don’t be too harsh if you can help it,” he began once more, half raising his hand. “Don’t suspect too much in some ways. In others you can’t suspect enough. You don’t understand—— Well, I was a fool. I was tempted. The Evil One followed me right along all the time from the day I left these mountains. He was right at my side every minute, though I didn’t know it. I reckon it was you that kept him away from me, Ma’am. For me, you have been the power of light. If I had stayed right close to you I’d never had such temptation. The Evil One had his own devices with me—it was—it was the temptation of St. Anthony, Ma’am. I can’t well talk. Can you understand?”

“It’s not necessary for me to understand!” said Marcia Haddon in white scorn. “I understand enough already. That woman was my husband’s mistress—everyone knew it except you—or did you know it?”

He turned upon her a face now suddenly so horrified in its suffering that even she relented.

“I’ve—I’ve been very ignorant, Ma’am,” said he. “I’ve known very little. I—didn’t know that. I thought she was very beautiful and good. Oh, not so beautiful as you, not so good—but what could I know about such things? I’ve never met but three women in my life, you might say. Well, you know the three, and you’re one of the three. You see, I didn’t know much about women, that’s all. Well, what she told me was true.”

“But surely you must have known——”

“How could I know? How much experience had I? How far had my education gone? I’ve met three women in all my life, I said. I’ve had two years of school. Well, that’s all. That’s my life. It isn’t much. I never knew much of—what you say.”

“Often?” asked Marcia Haddon—“How could it have been often that you met her?”

“Twice, Ma’am,” said David Joslin. “The last time to say good-by. That was up at Strattonville, not so very long ago. If it hadn’t been for that, I reckon I’d have gone on and finished my college course. I reckon maybe if I hadn’t met her then I could have been a preacher some time—I could have been president of this school—I could have had my life’s ambition and my hope. You say she ruined your life. Didn’t it come to the same thing with me? But I can’t call her bad—surely it wasn’t her fault in the least. I reckon it was the fault of life. But that was why I came back so soon. And that was why I met you when you came in. And you—you are a woman too.... But of another sort, I suppose. Better——”

“Did you know,” she said to him after a time, “that the Polly Pendleton Company was backed by my husband’s money all along? He was out on the road for weeks at a time—he practically abandoned me. Well, that was my husband!”

“And I’ve lost every honest dream of all my life because of that same woman,” he spoke after a time. “She herself tried to tell me, and I wouldn’t believe her. Well, you’ve made it easier.

“Not that it wasn’t over anyhow,” he added, with not the slightest trace of self-pride in his words. “Ma’am, let me tell you something—do you see that college house of ours up on the hill? Well, under the cornerstone of that building there are two things, and I put them both there myself. One is my copy of old John Calvin’s Institutes, and the other is a picture of Polly Pendleton. That’s a right odd combination, isn’t it, to go under the cornerstone of a college? Well, they’re both there.

“So now you know. As for me, I’ve got to finish my education before I’m big enough and good enough to teach or preach up there. It was you—not that woman—made me feel that. It was you that taught me how big and grand and sweet the world is, how much there is to learn, how much there is to do. It was you who have shown me how far I have to go. I reckon it’ll be over hot plowshares, Ma’am. I’ve got my ordeal yet ahead. May justice and not mercy be mine in my ordeal.

“You’ve made it easier,” he added after a time, “a heap easier. It’s only what the girl herself was trying to tell me—but I couldn’t believe it. Another man’s? No—I don’t share a woman with any other man on earth. What’s mine is mine. What’s his may be his. Let him rest up there on the hill. She’s dead, too, I reckon, now. But you see, I didn’t know. I’m glad you told me, Ma’am.”

“Don’t call me ‘Ma’am’!” exclaimed Marcia Haddon suddenly. “I hate that word!” Without any explanation, she rose and left him. She had seen the unveiling of a stark human life, and had begun to measure back her own life, her husband’s, with this whose story she now had heard. Hot plowshares? Why, yes, if need be. But that was his ordeal, and one that he had earned. Were men indeed all alike?