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Tessa inclined her head and gave the required promise.
‘You don’t know why,’ Mrs Finch began in a low voice, ‘the mistress gives to every beggar, deserving or otherwise. The reason comes into what I’m going to tell you. Miss Ludgate wasn’t always like that – not until up to about fifteen years ago.
‘She was old then, but active for her age, and very fond of gardenin’. Late one afternoon in the autumn, while she was cutting some late roses, a beggar came to the tradesmen’s door. Sick and ill and starved, he looked – but there, you’ve seen him. He was a bad lot, we found out afterwards, but I was sorry for him, and I was just going to risk givin’ him some food without orders, when up comes Miss Ludgate. “What’s this?” she says.
‘He whined something about not being able to get work.
‘ “Work!” says the mistress. “You don’t want work – you want charity. If you want to eat,” she says, “you shall, but you shall work first. There’s a broom,” she says, “and there’s a path littered with leaves. Start sweeping up at the top, and when you come to the end you can come and see me.”
‘Well, he took the broom, and a few minutes later I heard a shout from Miss Ludgate and come hurryin’ out. There was the man lyin’ at the top of the path where he’d commenced sweeping, and he’d collapsed and fallen down. I didn’t know then as he was dying, but he did, and he gave Miss Ludgate a look as I shall never forget.
‘ “When I’ve swept to the end of the path,” he says, “I’ll come for you, my lady, and we’ll feast together. Only see as you’re ready to be fetched when I come.” Those were his last words. He was buried by the parish, and it gave Miss Ludgate such a turn that she ordered something to be given to every beggar who came, and not one of ’em to be asked to do a stroke of work.
‘But next autumn, when the leaves began to fall, he came back and started sweeping, right at the top of the path, round about where he died. We’ve all heard him and most of us have seen him. Year after year he’s come back and swept with his broom, which just makes a brushing noise and hardly stirs a leaf. But each year he’s been getting nearer and nearer to the end of the path, and when he gets right to the end – well, I wouldn’t like to be the mistress, with all her money.’
It was three evenings later, just before the hour fixed for dinner, that the Sweeper completed his task. That is to say, if one reposes literal belief in Mrs Finch’s story.
The servants heard somebody burst open the tradesmen’s door, and, having rushed out into the passage, two of them saw that the door was open but found no one there. Miss Ludgate was already in the drawing-room, but Tessa was still upstairs, dressing for dinner. Presently Mrs Finch had occasion to enter the drawing-room to speak to her mistress; and her screams warned the household of what had happened. Tessa heard them just as she was ready to go downstairs, and she rushed into the drawing-room a few moments later.
Miss Ludgate was sitting upright in her favourite chair. Her eyes were open, but she was quite dead; and in her eyes there was something that Tessa could not bear to see.
Withdrawing her own gaze from that fixed stare of terror and recognition she saw something on the carpet and presently stooped to pick it up.
It was a little yellow leaf, damp and pinched and frayed, and but for her own experience and Mrs Finch’s tale she might have wondered how it had come to be there. She dropped it, shuddering, for it looked as if it had been picked up by, and had afterwards fallen from, the birch twigs of a stable broom.
Afterward
by Edith Wharton
‘Oh, there is one, of course, but you’ll never know it.’
The assertion, laughingly
flung out six months earlier in a bright June garden, came back to Mary Boyne with a new perception of its significance as she stood, in the December dusk, waiting for the lamps to be brought into the library.
The words had been spoken by their friend Alida Stair, as they sat at tea on her lawn at Pangbourne, in reference to the very house of which the library in question was the central, the pivotal, ‘feature’. Mary Boyne and her husband, in quest of a country place in one of the southern or south-western counties, had, on their arrival in England, carried their problem straight to Alida Stair, who had successfully solved it in her own case; but it was not until they had rejected, almost capriciously, several practical and judicious suggestions, that she threw out: ‘Well, there’s Lyng, in Dorsetshire. It belongs to Hugo’s cousins, and you can get it for a song.’
The reason she gave for its being obtainable on these terms – its remoteness from a station, its lack of electric light, hot-water pipes, and other vulgar necessities – were exactly those pleasing in its favour with two romantic Americans perversely in search of the economic drawbacks which were associated, in their tradition, with unusual architectural felicities.
‘I should never believe I was living in an old house unless I was thoroughly uncomfortable,’ Ned Boyne, the more extravagant of the two, had jocosely insisted; ‘the least hint of “convenience” would make me think it had been bought out of an exhibition, with the pieces numbered, and set up again.’ And they had proceeded to enumerate, with humorous precision, their various doubts and demands, refusing to believe that the house their cousin recommended was really Tudor till they learned it had no heating system, or that the village church was literally in the grounds till she assured them of the deplorable uncertainty of the water-supply.
‘It’s too uncomfortable to be true!’ Edward Boyne had continued to exult as the avowal of each disadvantage was successively wrung from her; but he had cut short his rhapsody to ask, with a relapse to distrust: ‘And the ghost? You’ve been concealing from us the fact that there is no ghost!’
Mary, at the moment, had laughed with him, yet almost with her laugh, being possessed of several sets of independent perceptions, had been struck by a note of flatness in Alida’s answering hilarity.
‘Oh, Dorsetshire’s full of ghosts, you know.’
‘Yes, yes; but that won’t do. I don’t want to have to drive ten miles to see somebody else’s ghost. I want one of my own on the premises. Is there a ghost at Lyng?’
His rejoinder had made Alida laugh again, and it was then that she had flung back, tantalizing: ‘Oh, there is one, of course, but you’ll never know it.’
‘Never know it?’ Boyne pulled her up. ‘But what in the world constitutes a ghost except the fact of its being known for one?’
‘I can’t say. But that’s the story.’
‘That there’s a ghost, but that nobody knows it’s a ghost?’
‘Well – not till afterward, at any rate.’
