The Fourth Ghost Story MEGAPACK ® - Sarah Orne Jewett

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growth had caught in his sleeve, and he sought to disengage the cloth without such rustling stir as might disturb or alarm the mourner, who had evidently lingered here, after the dispersal of the congregation, for a moment’s indulgence of grief and despair. He had a glimpse through the shaking boughs and the flickering mist of a woman’s figure kneeling on the crude red clods of a new-made grave. A vague, anxious wonder as to the deceased visited him, for in the sparsely settled districts a strong community sense prevails. Suddenly in a choking gust of sobs and burst of tears he recognized his own name in a voice of which every inflection was familiar. For a moment his heart seemed to stand still. His brain whirled with a realization of this unforeseen result of the fantastic story of his death in Eskaqua Cove, which the moonshiners, on the verge of detection and arrest, had circulated in Tanglefoot as a measure of safety. They had fancied that when the truth was developed it would be easy enough to declare the men drunk or mistaken. The “revenuers” by that time would be far away, and the pervasive security, always the sequence of a raid, successful or otherwise, would once more promote the manufacture of the brush whisky. The managers of the moon-shining interest had taken measures to guard Wyatt’s aged father from this fantasy of woe, but they had not dreamed that the mountain coquette might care. He himself stood appalled that this ghastly fable should delude his heart’s beloved, amazed that it should cost her one sigh, one sob. Her racking paroxysms of grief over this gruesome figment of a grave he was humiliated to hear, he was woeful to see. He felt that he was not worth one tear of the floods with which she bewept his name, uttered in every cadence of tender regret that her melancholy voice could compass. It must cease, she must know the truth at whatever cost. He broke through the hedge and stood in the flicker of the moonlight before her, pale, agitated, all unlike his wonted self.

      She did not hear, amid the tumult of her weeping, the rustling of the boughs, but some subtle sense took cognizance of his presence. She half rose, and with one hand holding back her dense yellow hair, which had fallen forward on her forehead, she looked up at him fearfully, tremulously, with all the revolt of the corporeal creature for the essence of the mysterious incorporeal. For a moment he could not speak. So much he must needs explain. The next instant he was whelmed in the avalanche of her words.

      “Te hev kem!” she exclaimed in a sort of shrill ecstasy. “Te hev kem so far ter hear the word that I would give my life ter hev said before. Te knowed it in heaven! an’ how like ye ter kem ter gin me the chanst ter say it at last! How like the good heart of ye, worth all the hearts on yearth—an’ buried hyar!”

      With her open palm she smote the insensate clods with a gesture of despair. Then she went on in a rising tide of tumultuous emotion. “I love ye! Oh, I always loved ye! I never keered fur nobody else! an’ I war tongue-tied, an’ full of fool pride, an’ faultin’ ye fur yer ways; an’ I wouldn’t gin ye the word I knowed ye war wantin’ ter hear. But now I kin tell the pore ghost of ye—I kin tell the pore, pore ghost!”

      She buried her swollen, tear-stained face in her hands, and shook her head to and fro with the realization of the futility of late repentance. As she once more lifted her eyes, she was obviously surprised to see him still standing there, and the crisis seemed to restore to him the faculty of speech.

      “Minta Elladine,” he said huskily and prosaically, “I ain’t dead!”

      She sprang to her feet and stood gazing at him, intent and quivering.

      “I be truly alive an’ kicking an’ ez worthless ez ever,” he went on.

      She said not a word, but bent and pallid, and, quaking in every muscle, stood peering beneath her hand, which still held back her hair.

      “It’s all a mistake,” he urged. “This ain’t no grave. The top war dug a leetle ter turn off a revenuer’s suspicions o’ the moonshiners. They put that tale out.”

      Still, evidently on the verge of collapse, she did not speak.

      “Ye needn’t be afeared ez I be goin’ ter take fur true all I hearn ye say; folks air gin ter vauntin’ the dead,” he paused for a moment, remembering the caustic comments over the deal of the cards, then added, “though I reckon I hev hed some cur’ous ’speriences ez a harnt.”

      She suddenly threw up both arms with a shrill scream, half nervous exhaustion, half inexpressible delight. She swayed to and fro, almost fainting, her balance failing. He caught her in his arms, and she leaned sobbing against his breast.

      “I stand ter every word of it,” she cried, her voice broken and lapsed from control. “I love ye, an’ I despise all the rest!”

      “I be powerful wild,” he suggested contritely.

      “I ain’t keerin’ ef ye be ez wild ez a deer.”

      “But I’m goin’ to quit gamesome company an’ playin’ kyerds an’ sech. I expec’ ter mend my ways now,” he promised eagerly.

      “Ye kin mend ’em or let ’em stay tore, jes ez ye please,” she declared recklessly. “I ain’t snatched my lovyer from the jaws o’ death ter want him otherwise; ye be plumb true-hearted, I know.”

      “I mought ez well hev been buried in this grave fer the last ten year’ fer all the use I hev been,” he protested solemnly; “but I hev learnt a lesson through bein’ a harnt fer a while—I hev jes kem ter life. I’m goin’ ter live now. I’ll make myself some use in the world, an’ fust off I be goin’ ter hinder the murder of a man what they hev got trapped up yander at the still.”

      This initial devoir of his reformation, however, Wyatt found no easy matter. The event had been craftily planned to seem an accident, a fall from a cliff in pursuing the wagon, and only the most ardent and cogent urgency on Wyatt’s part prevailed at length. He argued that this interpretation of the disaster would not satisfy the authorities. To take the raider’s life insured discovery, retribution. But as he had been brought to the still in the night, it was obvious that if he were conveyed under cover of darkness and by roundabout trails within striking distance of the settlements, he could never again find his way to the locality in the dense wilderness. In his detention he had necessarily learned nothing fresh, for the only names he could have overheard had long been obnoxious to suspicion of moonshining, and afforded no proof. Thus humanity, masquerading as caution, finally triumphed, and the officer, blindfolded, was conducted through devious and winding ways many miles distant, and released within a day’s travel of the county town.

      Walter Wyatt was scarcely welcomed back to life by the denizens of the cove generally with the enthusiasm attendant on the first moments of his resuscitation, so to speak. He never forgot the solemn ecstasy of that experience, and in later years he was wont to annul any menace of discord with his wife by the warning, half jocose, half tender: “Ye hed better mind; ye’ll be sorry some day fur treatin’ me so mean. Remember, I hev viewed ye a-weepin’ over my grave before now.”

      A reformation, however complete and salutary, works no change of identity, and although he developed into an orderly, industrious, law-abiding citizen, his prankish temperament remained recognizable in the fantastic fables which he delighted to recount at some genial fireside of what he had seen and heard as a ghost.

      “Pears like, Watt, ye hed more experiences whenst dead than living,” said an auditor, as these stories multiplied.

      “I did, fur a fack,” Watt protested. “I war a powerful onchancy, onquiet ghost. I even did my courtin’ whilst in my reg’lar line o’ business a-hanatin’ a graveyard.”

      (1896.)

      I

      After arranging the Egyptian and Mexican pottery so as to contrast agreeably with the Dutch and the German beer-mugs on the top of the bookcase that ran along one wall of the sitting-room, Cosmo Waynflete went back into the bedroom and took from a half-empty trunk the little cardboard boxes in which he kept the collection of playing-cards, and of all manner of outlandish equivalents for these simple instruments of fortune, picked up here and there during his two or three years of dilettante travelling

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