Questionable Shapes | Page 3

he could
walk about for an hour he might return to St. Johnswort, and worry
through the remaining hour till breakfast somehow. He was still
framing in his thoughts some sort of statement concerning the
apparition which he should make when the largest number of guests
had got together at the table, with a fine question whether he should
take them between the cantaloupe and the broiled chicken, or wait till
they had come to the corn griddle-cakes, which St. John's cook served
of a filigree perfection in homage to the good old American breakfast
ideal. There would be more women, if he waited, and he should need

the sympathy and countenance of women; his story would be wanting
in something of its supreme effect without the electrical response of
their keener nerves.

II.
When Hewson came up to the cottage he was sensible of a certain
agitation in the air, which was intensified to him by the sight of St.
John, in his bare, bald head and the négligé of a flannel housecoat,
inspecting, with the gardener and one of the grooms, the fallen trellis
under the library window, which from time to time they looked up at,
as they talked. Hewson made haste to join them, through the garden
gate, and to say shamefacedly enough, "Oh, I'm afraid I'm responsible
for that," and he told how he must have thrown down the trellis in
getting out of the window.
"Oh!" said St. John, while the two men walked away with dissatisfied
grins at being foiled of their sensation. "We thought it was burglars. I'm
so glad it was only you." But in spite of his profession, St. John did not
give Hewson any very lively proof of his enjoyment. "Deuced
uncomfortable to have had one's guests murdered in their beds. Don't
say anything about it, please, Hewson. The women would all fly the
premises, if there'd been even a suspicion of burglars."
"Oh, no; I won't," Hewson willingly assented; but he perceived a
disappointment in St. John's tone and manner, and he suspected him,
however unjustly, of having meant to give himself importance with his
guests by the rumor of a burglary in the house.
He was a man quite capable of that, Hewson believed, and failing it,
capable of pretending that he wanted the matter hushed up in the
interest of others.
In any case he saw that it was not to St. John primarily, or secondarily
to St. John's guests, that he could celebrate the fact of his apparition. In
the presence of St. John's potential vulgarity he keenly felt his own, and
he recoiled from what he had imagined doing. He even realized that he
would have been working St. John an injury by betraying his house to
his guests as the scene of a supernatural incident.
Nobody believes in ghosts, but there is not one in a thousand of us who
would not be uncomfortable in a haunted house, or a house so reputed.
If Hewson told what he had seen, he would not only scatter St. John's

house-party to the four winds, but he would cast such a blight upon St.
Johnswort that it would never sell for a tenth of its cost.

III.
From that instant Hewson renounced his purpose, and he remained true
to this renunciation in spite of the behavior of St. John, which might
well have tempted him to a revenge in kind. No one seemed to have
slept late that morning; several of the ladies complained that they had
not slept a wink the whole night, and two or three of the men owned to
having waked early and not been able to hit it off again in a morning
nap, though it appeared that they were adepts in that sort of thing. The
hour of their vigils corresponded so nearly with that of Hewson's
apparition that he wondered if a mystical influence from it had not
penetrated the whole house. The adventitious facts were of such a
nature that he controlled with the greater difficulty the wish to explode
upon an audience so aptly prepared for it the prodigious incident which
he was keeping in reserve; but he did not yield even when St. John
carefully led up to the point through the sensation of his guests, by
recounting the evidences of the supposed visit of a burglar, and then
made his effect by suddenly turning upon Hewson, and saying with his
broad guffaw: "And here you have the burglar in person. He has owned
his crime to me, and I've let him off the penalty on condition that he
tells you all about it." The humor was not too rank for the horsey
people whom St. John had mainly about him, but some of the women