Fourth and last part of a ghost story by Edith Wharton, included in her collection Here and Beyond from 1926. And with this, our Advent Calendar comes at an end! First part here. Second part here. Third part here.
The next day Bosworth’s sister Loretta, who kept house for him, asked him, when he came in for his midday dinner, if he had heard the news.
Bosworth had been sawing wood all the morning, and in spite of the cold and the driving snow, which had begun again in the night, he was covered with an icy sweat, like a man getting over a fever.
“What news?”
“Venny Brand’s down sick with pneumonia. The Deacon’s been there. I guess she’s dying.”
Bosworth looked at her with listless eyes. She seemed far off from him, miles away. “Venny Brand?” he echoed.
“You never liked her, Orrin.”
“She’s a child. I never knew much about her.”
“Well,” repeated his sister, with the guileless relish of the unimaginative for bad news, “I guess she’s dying.” After a pause she added: “It’ll kill Sylvester Brand, all alone up there.”
120Bosworth got up and said: “I’ve got to see to poulticing the gray’s fetlock.” He walked out into the steadily falling snow.
Venny Brand was buried three days later. The Deacon read the service; Bosworth was one of the pall-bearers. The whole countryside turned out, for the snow had stopped falling, and at any season a funeral offered an opportunity for an outing that was not to be missed. Besides, Venny Brand was young and handsome—at least some people thought her handsome, though she was so swarthy—and her dying like that, so suddenly, had the fascination of tragedy.
“They say her lungs filled right up…. Seems she’d had bronchial troubles before…. I always said both them girls was frail…. Look at Ora, how she took and wasted away! And it’s colder’n all outdoors up there to Brand’s…. Their mother, too, she pined away just the same. They don’t ever make old bones on the mother’s side of the family…. There’s that young Bedlow over there; they say Venny was engaged to him…. Oh, Mrs. Rutledge, 121excuse me…. Step right into the pew; there’s a seat for you alongside of grandma….”
Mrs. Rutledge was advancing with deliberate step down the narrow aisle of the bleak wooden church. She had on her best bonnet, a monumental structure which no one had seen out of her trunk since old Mrs. Silsee’s funeral, three years before. All the women remembered it. Under its perpendicular pile her narrow face, swaying on the long thin neck, seemed whiter than ever; but her air of fretfulness had been composed into a suitable expression of mournful immobility.
“Looks as if the stone-mason had carved her to put atop of Venny’s grave,” Bosworth thought as she glided past him; and then shivered at his own sepulchral fancy. When she bent over her hymn book her lowered lids reminded him again of marble eye-balls; the bony hands clasping the book were bloodless. Bosworth had never seen such hands since he had seen old Aunt Cressidora Cheney strangle the canary-bird because it fluttered.
The service was over, the coffin of Venny 122Brand had been lowered into her sister’s grave, and the neighbours were slowly dispersing. Bosworth, as pall-bearer, felt obliged to linger and say a word to the stricken father. He waited till Brand had turned from the grave with the Deacon at his side. The three men stood together for a moment; but not one of them spoke. Brand’s face was the closed door of a vault, barred with wrinkles like bands of iron.
Finally the Deacon took his hand and said: “The Lord gave—”
Brand nodded and turned away toward the shed where the horses were hitched. Bosworth followed him. “Let me drive along home with you,” he suggested.
Brand did not so much as turn his head. “Home? What home?” he said; and the other fell back.
Loretta Bosworth was talking with the other women while the men unblanketed their horses and backed the cutters out into the heavy snow. As Bosworth waited for her, a few feet off, he saw Mrs. Rutledge’s tall bonnet lording it above the group. Andy 123Pond, the Rutledge farm-hand, was backing out the sleigh.
“Saul ain’t here today, Mrs. Rutledge, is he?” one of the village elders piped, turning a benevolent old tortoise-head about on a loose neck, and blinking up into Mrs. Rutledge’s marble face.
Bosworth heard her measure out her answer in slow incisive words. “No. Mr. Rutledge he ain’t here. He would ‘a’ come for certain, but his aunt Minorca Cummins is being buried down to Stotesbury this very day and he had to go down there. Don’t it sometimes seem zif we was all walking right in the Shadow of Death?”
As she walked toward the cutter, in which Andy Pond was already seated, the Deacon went up to her with visible hesitation. Involuntarily Bosworth also moved nearer. He heard the Deacon say: “I’m glad to hear that Saul is able to be up and around.”
She turned her small head on her rigid neck, and lifted the lids of marble.
“Yes, I guess he’ll sleep quieter now.—And her too, maybe, now she don’t lay there alone any longer,” she added in a low voice, 124with a sudden twist of her chin toward the fresh black stain in the grave-yard snow. She got into the cutter, and said in a clear tone to Andy Pond: “’S long as we’re down here I don’t know but what I’ll just call round and get a box of soap at Hiram Pringle’s.”
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