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Updated: May 8, 2025
She never gives way living or dead." This was more than human nature could stand. "In Heaven's name," I cried irritably, "who is she?" "Don't you know?" She appeared genuinely surprised. "Why, she is the other Mrs. Vanderbridge. She died fifteen years ago, just a year after they were married, and people say a scandal was hushed up about her, which he never knew.
It was plain that she was suffering acutely, and while I patted her shoulder, I thought what a wonderful mistress Mrs. Vanderbridge must be to have attached a servant to her so strongly. "You must remember that I am a stranger in the house, that I scarcely know her, that I've never even seen her husband," I said warningly, for I've always avoided, as far as possible, the confidences of servants.
Then, as the cord broke in my grasp and I gathered the letters from the lid of the desk, a word or two flashed back at me through the torn edges of the envelopes, and I realized that they were love letters written, I surmised, some fifteen years ago, by Mr. Vanderbridge to his first wife. "It may hurt her to see them," I thought, "but I don't dare destroy them.
The question was still in my mind when my eyes fell on the envelope in my hand, and I saw that it was addressed to Mrs. Roger Vanderbridge. So this explained, in a measure at least, the carelessness and the disorder! The desk was not his, but hers, and after her death he had used it only during those desperate months when he barely opened a letter.
One of the innumerable servants had already turned down my bed, so when Hopkins appeared at the door, I suspected at once that there was a hidden motive underlying her ostensible purpose. "Mrs. Vanderbridge told me to look after you," she began. "She is afraid you will be lonely until you learn the way of things." "No, I'm not lonely," I answered. "I've never had time to be lonely."
Vanderbridge, for whatever the secret tragedy of their marriage might be, I instinctively knew that the fault was not on the side of the wife. She was as sweet and winning as if she were still the reigning beauty in the academy for young ladies.
Vanderbridge had used this room for a while, and after her death her husband had been in the habit of shutting himself up alone here in the evenings. This, I inferred, was the secret reason why my employer was sending the furniture away. She had resolved to clear the house of every association with the past.
"Between Mrs. Vanderbridge and the Other One?" Her look answered me. "You think, then, that she means harm to her?" "I don't know. Nobody knows but she is killing her." The clock struck ten, and I returned to my book with a yawn, while Hopkins gathered up her work and went out, after wishing me a formal good night.
The nearest I can come to it is to call it a sense of blessedness of blessedness that made you at peace with everything you had once hated. Not until afterwards did I realize that it was the victory of good over evil. Not until afterwards did I discover that Mrs. Vanderbridge had triumphed over the past in the only way that she could triumph.
She was merely wilful and undisciplined and I hardly know how to convey what I mean elfish. After her entrance the dinner dragged on heavily. Mrs. Vanderbridge still kept up her nervous chatter, but nobody listened, for I was too embarrassed to pay any attention to what she said, and Mr. Vanderbridge had never recovered from his abstraction.
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