I don't understand you. What do you mean by saying you've come to see the house?"
For only answer the woman, turning her back on her, walked another step or two along the little passage. She exclaimed, as if addressing the staircase, which was in front of her, in what seemed a tone of intense emotion-
"How his presence is in all the place! How he fills the air!"
Madge felt more bewildered than she would have cared to admit. Was the woman mad? Mad or sane, she resolved that she would not submit tamely to such another irruption as the last. She laid her hand upon the woman's shoulder.
"Will you be so good as to tell me, at once, to whom I have the pleasure of speaking, and what business has brought you here?"
The woman turned and looked at her; as she did so, Madge was conscious of a curious sense of discomfort.
She was of medium height, slender build, and apparently between forty and fifty years of age. Her attire was not only shabby, it was tawdry to the last degree. Her garments were a heterogeneous lot; one might safely swear they had none of them been made for the wearer. One and all were shocking examples of outworn finery. The black chip hat which she wore perched on her head, with an indescribable sort of would-be jauntiness, was broken at the brim, and the one-time gorgeous ostrich feathers were crushed and soiled. A once well-cut cape of erstwhile dark blue cloth was about her shoulders. It was faded, stained, and creased. The fur which had been used to adorn the edges was bare and rusty. It had been lined with silk-as she moved her arms one perceived that of the lining there was nothing left but rags and tatters. Her dress, once the latest fashionable freak in some light-hued flimsy silk, had long since been fit for nothing else than cutting into dusters. She wore ancient patent-leather shoes upon her feet, and equally ancient gloves upon her hands-the bare flesh showing through holes in every finger.
If her costume was strange, her face was stranger. It was the face of a woman who had once been beautiful-how long ago, no one who chanced on her haphazard could with any certainty have guessed. It might have been five, ten, fifteen, twenty years ago-and more than that-since hers had been a countenance which charmed even a casual beholder. It was the face of a woman who had been weak or wicked, and maybe both, and who in consequence had been bandied from pillar to post, till this was all that there was left of her. Her big blue eyes were deep set in careworn caverns; her mouth, which had once been small and dainty, was now blurred and pendulous, the mouth of a woman who drank; her cheeks were sunk and hollow as if she had lost every tooth in her head, the cheek-bones gleaming through the yellow skin in sharp and cruel ridges. To crown it all, her hair was dyed-a vivid yellow. Like all the rest of her, the dye was old and worn. It stood in urgent need of a renewal. The roots were grey, they demonstrated their greyness with savage ostentation. Here and there among the yellow there were grey patches too-in some queer way her attempt at juvenesence had made her look older even than she was.
This was not a pleasant face to have encountered anywhere at any time, being the sort from which good women instinctively shrink back. Just now its unpleasantness was intensified by the fact that it was lit up by some, to Madge, inscrutable emotion; inflamed by some mastering excitement. The hollow eyes gleamed as if they were lighted by inner fires; the lips twitched as if the muscles which worked them were uncontrollable. The woman spoke in short, sharp, angry gusts, as if she were stumbling on the verge of frenzied passion.
"This house is mine," she said.
"Yours?"
"It was his, and mine-and now it's mine."
Madge, persuaded that the woman must be either mad or drunk, felt that perhaps calmness might be her safest weapon.
"Do you mean that you're the landlady?"
"The landlady!" The woman laughed-unmirthfully. "There is no landlady. And the landlord-he's a ghost. He's in it now-don't you feel that he is in it?"
She spoke with such singular intensity that, in spite of herself, Madge shuddered. She was feeling more and more uncomfortable-wishing heartily that some one might come, if it was only the mysterious stranger who had previously intruded.
The woman went on-her excitement seeming to grow with every word she uttered.
"The house is full of ghosts-full! They're in every corner, every nook and cranny-and I know them every one. Come here-I'll show you some of them."
She caught the girl by the arm. Madge, yielding to her strange frenzy, suffered herself to be led into the sitting-room. Once inside, the woman loosed her hold. She looked about her. Then crossed to the fireplace, standing in the centre of the hearthrug.
"This is where I struck him." She pointed just in front of her. "He was sitting there. I had asked him for some money. He would not let me have any. He always clung to his money-always! I swear it-always!" She raised her hands, as if appealing to the ceiling to bear her witness. "He said that I was ruining him. Ruining him? bah! I knew better than that. He would let no one ruin him-he was not of that kind. I told him I must have money. He said he'd given me five pounds last week. 'Five pounds!' I cried; 'what are five pounds?' Then we quarrelled-he said things, I said things. Then I flew into a rage; my temper has been the curse of my whole life. I caught up a decanter of whisky which was on the table, and struck him with it on the head. The bottle broke, the whisky went all over him-how it smelt! Can't you smell it? – and he went tumbling down, down, on to the floor. He's lying there now-can't you see him lying there?" She turned to Madge with a gesture which seemed to make the girl's blood run colder. "Can't you see the ghost?"
She moved a little to one side.
"Just here is where I knelt down, and asked him to forgive me. That was after-I'd been carrying on with some fellow I'd met at a dance, and he had found me out. I cried and cried as if my heart would break, and at last he came and put his hand upon my head-when I set myself to do it, and stuck at it, I could twist him round my finger! – and he began to stroke my hair-I'd lovely hair then, no woman ever had lovelier, and he was always one to stroke it when I'd let him! – and he said, 'My girl, how often shall I have to forgive you?' Listen! Can't you hear him saying it now? Can't you see the ghost?"
She went to where the modest sideboard stood.
"This is where we had our sideboard too-it was a bigger one than this; all our things were good. I was standing here, leaning against it just like this, the first time he saw me drunk. He'd been out all the evening on some sort of business, and I'd been left in the house alone with the girl, and I hadn't liked it, and I'd been sulking. And at last I got to the whisky and I started to drink, drink, drink. I always had been fond of drink long before that, but I'd never let him find it out. But that time I was that sulky I didn't seem to care, and by the time I might have cared I couldn't care-I was too far gone. I had to keep on drinking. There wasn't much in the bottle; when I got to the end of it I started on another. Then I got to the sideboard, and stood leaning over it, lolly fashion, booze, booze, boozing. All of a sudden the door opened, and he came into the room. I turned to have a look at him, the bottle in one hand and the glass in the other. Directly I got clear of the sideboard I went flop on the floor, and the bottle and the glass went with me, and there I had to lie. He rushed towards me, and as soon as he had had a look at me he saw how it was. Then he fell on his knees at my side, and put his hands up to his face, and began to cry. My God, how he did cry! – not like me. His sobs seemed tearing him to pieces, and his life's blood seemed coming from him with every tear. Drunk as I was, it made me cry to hear him. Listen! Can't you hear him crying now? Can't you see the ghost?"
The woman's words and manner were so realistic, and despite-or perhaps because of-her seeming frenzy, she had such an eerie capacity of conjuring up the picture as her memory painted it, that Madge listened spellbound. She was as incapable of interrupting the other's flow of language
