Humorous Ghost Stories Part 25

[1] Skuat, windfall.

THE HAUNTED PHOTOGRAPH

BY RUTH McENERY STUART

From _Harper's Bazar_, June, 1909. By permission of _Harper's Bazar_.

The Haunted Photograph

BY RUTH McENERY STUART

To the ordinary observer it was just a common photograph of a cheap summer hotel. It hung sumptuously framed in plush, over the Widow Morris's mantel, the one resplendent note in an otherwise modest home, in a characteristic Queen Anne village.

One had only to see the rapt face of its owner as she sat in her weeds before the picture, which she tearfully p.r.o.nounced "a strikin'

likeness," to sympathize with the townsfolk who looked askance at the bereaved woman, even while they bore with her delusion, feeling sure that her sudden sorrow had set her mind agog.

When she had received the picture through the mail, some months before the fire which consumed the hotel--a fire through which she had not pa.s.sed, but out of which she had come a widow--she proudly pa.s.sed it around among the friends waiting with her at the post-office, replying to their questions as they admired it:

"Oh, yes! That's where he works--if you can call it work. He's the head steward in it. All that row o' winders where you see the awnin's down, they're his--an' them that ain't down, they're his, too--that is to say, it's his jurisdiction.

"You see, he's got the whip hand over the cook an' the sto'eroom, an'

that key don't go out o' his belt unless he knows who's gettin'

what--an' he's firm. Morris always was. He's like the iron law of the Ephesians."

"What key?"

It was an old lady who held the picture at arm's length, the more closely to scan it, who asked the question. She asked it partly to know, as neither man nor key appeared in the photograph, and partly to parry the "historic allusion"--a disturbing sort of fire for which Mrs. Morris was rather noted and which made some of her most loyal townsfolk a bit shy of her.

"Oh, I ain't referrin' to the picture," she hastened to explain. "I mean the keys thet he always carries in his belt. The reg'lar joke there is to call him 'St. Peter,' an' he takes it in good part, for, he declares, if there _is_ such a thing _as_ a similitude to the kingdom o' Heaven _in_ a hotel, why, it's in the providential supply department which, in a manner, hangs to his belt. He always humors a joke--'specially on himself."

No one will ever know through what painful periods of unrequited longing the Widow Morris had sought solace in this, her only cherished "relic,"

after the "half hour of sky-works" which had made her, in her own vernacular, "a lonely, conflagrated widow, with a heart full of ashes,"

before the glad moment when it was given her to discern in it an unsuspected and novel value. First had come, as a faint gleam of comfort, the reflection that although her dear lost one was not in evidence in the picture, he had really been inside the building when the photograph was taken, and so, of course, _he must be in there yet_!

At first she experienced a slight disappointment that her man was not visible, at door or window. But it was only a pa.s.sing regret. It was really better to feel him surely and broadly within--at large in the great house, free to pa.s.s at will from one room to another. To have had him fixed, no matter how effectively, would have been a limitation. As it was, she pressed the picture to her bosom as she wondered if, perchance, he would not some day come out of his hiding to meet her.

It was a m.u.f.fled pleasure and tremulously entertained at first, but the very whimsicality of it was an appeal to her sensitized imagination, and so, when finally the thing did really happen, it is small wonder that it came somewhat as a shock.

It appears that one day, feeling particularly lonely and forlorn, and having no other comfort, she was pressing her tear-stained face against the row of window-shutters in the room without awnings, this being her nearest approach to the alleged occupant's bosom, when she was suddenly startled by a peculiar swishing sound, as of wind-blown rain, whereupon she lifted her face to perceive that it was indeed raining, and then, glancing back at the photograph, she distinctly saw her husband rushing from one window to another, drawing down the sashes on the side of the house that would have been exposed to the real shower whose music was in her ears.

This was a great discovery, and, naturally enough, it set her weeping, for, she sobbed, it made her feel, for a minute, that she had lost her widowhood and that, after the shower, he'd be coming home.

It might well make any one cry to suddenly lose the pivot upon which his emotions are swung. At any rate, Mrs. Morris cried. She said that she cried all night, first because it seemed so spooky to see him whose remains she had so recently buried on faith, waiving recognition in the debris, dashing about now in so matter-of-fact a way.

And then she wept because, after all, he did not come.

This was the formal beginning of her sense of personal companionship in the picture--companionship, yes, of delight in it, for there is even delight in tears--in some situations in life. Especially is this true of one whose emotions are her only guides, as seems to have been the case with the Widow Morris.

After seeing him draw the window-sashes--and he had drawn them _down_, ignoring her presence--she sat for hours, waiting for the rain to stop.

It seemed to have set in for a long spell, for when she finally fell asleep, "from sheer disappointment, 'long towards morning," it was still raining, but when she awoke the sun shone and all the windows in the picture were up again.

This was a misleading experience, however, for she soon discovered that she could not count upon any line of conduct by the man in the hotel, as the fact that it had one time rained in the photograph at the same time that it rained outside was but a coincidence and she was soon surprised to perceive all quiet along the hotel piazza, not even an awning flapping, while the earth, on her plane, was torn by storms.

On one memorable occasion when her husband had appeared, flapping the window-panes from within with a towel, she had thought for one brief moment that he was beckoning to her, and that she might have to go to him, and she was beginning to experience terror, with shortness of breath and other premonitions of sudden pa.s.sing, when she discovered that he was merely killing flies, and she flurriedly fanned herself with the asbestos mat which she had seized from the stove beside her, and staggered out to a seat under the mulberries, as she stammered:

"I do declare, Morris'll be the death of me yet. He's 'most as much care to me dead as he was alive--I made sure--made sure he'd come after me!"

Then, feeling her own fidelity challenged, she hastened to add:

"Not that I hadn't rather go to him than to take any trip in the world, but--but I never did fancy that hotel, and since I've got used to seein'

him there so constant, I feel sure that's where we'd put up. My belief is, anyway, that if there's hereafters for some things, there's hereafters for all. From what I can gather, I reckon I'm a kind of a cross between a Swedenborgian and a Gates-ajar--that, of course, engrafted on to a Methodist. Now, that hotel, when it was consumed by fire, which to it was the same as mortal death, why, it either ascended into Heaven, in smoke, or it fell, in ashes--to the other place. If it died worthy, like as not it's undergoin' repairs now for a 'mansion,'

jasper cupalos, an'--but, of course, such as that could be run up in a twinklin'.

"Still, from what I've heard, it's more likely gone _down_ to its deserts. It would seem hard for a hotel with so many awned-off corridors an' palmed embrasures with teet-a-teet sofas, to live along without sin."

She stood on her step-ladder, wiping the face of the picture as she spoke, and as she began to back down she discovered the cat under her elbow, glaring at the picture.

"Yes, Kitty! Spit away!" she exclaimed. "Like as not you see even more than I do!"

And as she slipped the ladder back into the closet, she remarked--this to herself, strictly:

"If it hadn't 'a' been for poor puss, I'd 'a' had a heap more pleasure out o' this picture than what I have had--or will be likely to have again. The way she's taken on, I've almost come to hate it!"

A serpent had entered her poor little Eden--even the green-eyed monster constrictor, who, if given full swing, would not spare a bone of her meager comfort.

A neighbor who chanced to come in at the time, un.o.bserved overheard the last remark, and Mrs. Morris, seeing that she was there, continued in an unchanged tone, while she gave her a chair:

"Of course, Mis' Withers, you can easy guess who I refer to. I mean that combly-featured wench that kep' the books an' answered the telephone at the hotel--when she found the time from her meddlin'. Somehow, I never thought about her bein' _burned in_ with Morris till puss give her away.

Puss never did like the girl when she was alive, an' the first time I see her scratch an' spit at the picture, just the way she used to do whenever _she_ come in sight, why, it just struck me like a clap o'

thunder out of a clear sky that puss knew who she was a-spittin' at--an'

I switched around sudden--an' glanced up sudden--an'----

"Well, what I seen, I seen! There was that beautied-up typewriter settin' in the window-sill o' Morris's butler's pantry--an' if she didn't wink at me malicious, then I don't know malice when I see it. An'

she used her fingers against her nose, too, most defiant and impolite.

So I says to puss I says, 'Puss,' I says, 'there's _goin's on_ in that hotel, sure as fate. Annabel Bender has got the better o' me, for once!' An', tell the truth, it did spoil the photograph for me for a while, for, of course, after that, if I didn't see him somewheres on the watch for his faithful spouse, I'd say to myself, 'He's inside there with that pink-featured hussy!'

"You know, a man's a man, Mis' Withers--'specially Morris, an' with his lawful wife cut off an' indefinitely divorced by a longevitied family--an' another burned in with him--well, his faithfulness is put to a trial by fire, as you might say. So, as I say, it spoiled the picture for me, for a while.

"An', to make matters worse, it wasn't any time before I recollected that Campbellite preacher thet was burned in with them, an' with that my imagination run riot, an' I'd think to myself, '_If_ they're inclined, they cert'n'y have things handy!' Then I'd ketch myself an' say, 'Where's your faith in Scripture, Mary Marthy Matthews, named after two Bible women an' born daughter to an apostle? What's the use?' I'd say, an' so, first an' last, I'd get a sort o' alpha an' omega comfort out o'

the pa.s.sage about no givin' in marriage. Still, there'd be times, pray as I would, when them three would loom up, him an' her--_an'_ the Campbellite preacher. I know his license to marry would run out _in time_, but for eternity, of course we don't know. Seem like everything would last forever--an' then again, if I've got a widow's freedom, Morris must be cla.s.sed as a widower, if he's anything.