His Apparition by William Dean Howells

A week of silence passed, and then one night St. John himself appeared at Hewson's apartment. Hewson almost knew that it was his ring at the door, and in the tremulous note of his voice asking the man if he were at home, he recognized the great blubbery fellow's most plaintive mood.

"Well, Hewson," he whimpered, without staying for any form of greeting when they stood face to face, "this has been a terrible business for me. You can't imagine how it's broken me up in every direction."

"I -- I'm afraid I can, St. John," Hewson began, but St. John cut him off.

"Oh, no, you can't. Look here! " He showed a handful of letters. "All from people who had promised to stay with me, taking it back, since that infernal interview of yours, or from people who hadn't answered before, saying they can't come. Of course they make all sorts of civil excuses. I shouldn't know what to do with these people if any of them came. There isn't a servant left on the place, except the gardener who lives in his own house, and the groom who sleeps in the stable. For the last three days I've had to take my meals at that infernal inn where you got your coffee."

"Is it so bad as that? " Hewson gasped.

"Yes, it is. It's so bad that sometimes I can't realize it. Do you actually mean to tell me, Hewson that you saw a ghost in my house?"

"I never said a ghost. I said an apparition. I don't know what it was. It may have been an optical delusion. I call it an apparition, because that's the shortest way out. You know I'm not a spiritualist."

"Yes, that's the devil of it," said St. John. "That's the very thing that makes people believe it _is_ a ghost. There isn't one of them that don't say to himself and the other fellows that if a cool, clear-headed chap like you saw something queer, it _must_ have been a ghost; and so they go on knocking my house down in price till I don't believe it would fetch fifteen hundred under the hammer to-morrow. It's simply ruin to me."

"Ruin? " Hewson echoed.

"Yes, ruin," St. John repeated. "Before this thing came out I refused twenty-five thousand for the place, because I knew I could get twenty-eight thousand. Now I couldn't get twenty-eight hundred. Couldn't you understand that the reputation of being haunted simply plays the devil with a piece of property? " "Yes; yes, I did understand that, and for that very reason I was always careful -- "

"Careful! To tell people that you had seen a ghost in my house?"

"No! _Not_ to tell them where I had seen a ghost. I never -- "

"How did it get out then?"

"I," Hewson began, and then he stood with his mouth open, unable to close it for the articulation of the next word, which he at last huskily whispered forth, "can't tell you."

"Can't tell me? " wailed St. John. "Well, I call that pretty rough!"

"It is rough," Hewson admitted; "and Heaven knows that I would make it smooth if I could. I never once -- except once only -- mentioned your place in connection with the matter. I was scrupulously careful not to do so, for I did imagine something like what has happened. I would do anything -- anything -- in reparation. But I can't even tell you how the name of your place got out in the connection, though certainly you have a right to ask and to know. The circumstances were -- peculiar. The person -- was one that I wouldn't have dreamt was capable of repeating it. It was as if I had said the words over to myself."

"Well, I can't understand all that," said St. John, with rueful sulkiness, from which he brisked up to ask, as if by a sudden inspiration, "If it was only to one person, why couldn't you deny it, and throw the onus on the other fellow? " He looked up at Hewson, standing nerveless before him, from where he lay mournfully wallowing in an easy-chair, as if now for the first time, there might be a gleam of hope for them both in some such notion.

Hewson slowly shook his head. "It wouldn't work. The person -- isn't that kind of person."

"Why, but see here," St. John urged. "There must be something in the fellow that you can appeal to. If you went and told him how it was playing the very deuce with me pecuniarily, he would see the necessity of letting you deny it, and taking the consequences, if he was anything of a man at all."

"He isn't anything of a man at all," said Hewson, in mechanical and melancholy parody.