Mary Shelley — Chapter 3: An erased marginal note in a late-century ledger — Novella Movement 2

I set down this account for you, Cornelia, who will read it, I trust, only after I have gone from this house forever; for I am given a fortnight in which to quit these rooms, and a fortnight, I have found, is time enough to unmake a life, though not, alas, to explain one. I write in haste, and in the queer, watched stillness of a chamber that was once my uncle's study; a room of oak panels darkened by a century of pipe-smoke, of shelves bowed under the weight of unread sermons, of a single leaded window through which the autumn light falls thin and reluctant, as though ashamed to enter. But it is not the light that troubles me. It is the small glass eye fixed above the door, no larger than a shilling, which the new tenants installed before ever I was permitted to gather what remained of my inheritance, and which watches me now as I watch the page.

Among my uncle's effects I discovered a ledger, bound in calf now cracked and silvered like the skin of something very old; its pages recorded, in a hand grown fainter with each decade, the small transactions of a country household — coals, candles, the wages of a groom, the interest upon a debt never named outright. But upon the margin of one leaf, some entry had been made and then destroyed; not torn away, for the page was whole, but scored through with such violence of the pen that the ink had eaten a thin scar into the paper, and beneath the scar, illegible, some fragment of a word survived, curling like a root beneath blighted soil. I held the page to the window; I held it near the candle; yet the erasure kept its secret as jealously as the grave keeps its dead, and I felt, though I could not yet have named it, the cold drop of foreboding gather upon my brow.

It was at this hour that Vane came to me, as he had come every evening since my uncle's death, uninvited and yet, by some perversity of my own nature, never quite unwelcome. He was a man of easy carriage and watchful eye, who had made of other men's misfortunes a modest and comfortable trade; he looked upon the ledger over my shoulder with the frank curiosity of a magpie regarding a fallen ring, and he said, in accents of cheerful calculation, that an erasure of that violence was worth more than any entry left plain, for a man does not labor to destroy what is without value.

"Tell me, then," said I, turning the scarred page toward him, "what debt could a man contract that he would rather blot out his own hand than let it stand; what shame follows a household into its account-books; what is it, Vane, that a soul will not suffer even the dead paper to remember?" He did not lift his eyes to mine, but let them rest upon the ledger, and answered only, "Some things are best owed to silence," in a tone grown suddenly shorter and colder than his wont. I pressed him no further; instead I bid him look upon the garden through the leaded glass — the sundial green with lichen, the yew hedge grown shapeless with neglect, the cold stone bench where my uncle had been used to sit — as though the sight of ordered decay might serve in place of an answer. It did not console him. I confess it did not console me.

"And all the while the little sensor above the door kept its silent vigil, recording, I did not doubt, this very conversation into some ledger of its own, a modern book of accounts kept by no hand and erased by no shame; and I wondered, with a dread I could not yet call by its proper name, whether ours was the first generation to imagine that a thing so carefully watched might also, at last, be carefully forgotten."

Night came upon that house before I had settled the question, as it comes upon all houses fated soon to be emptied of their history — not gently, Cornelia, but with a kind of grim officiousness, as though the darkness itself had been engaged, like the men who would come next week with their crates and their inventories, to clear away what light remained. I sat long after Vane had gone, that same ledger open upon my knee, the little glass eye above the door fixed upon me with its patient, undeviating attention; and I own that I came, in that hour, to a strange and bitter kinship with the thing, for we were both of us set to watch what neither of us was permitted to keep.

I had thought, when first I pressed him, that Vane withheld the truth from cunning, that he meant to sell it to me by degrees, a farthing's worth of knowledge at a time, as was his custom with the widow at the mill and the curate's sister and any other soul whose distress he had learned to value above their friendship. But when he returned near midnight — for he could not, I think, keep from the ledger any more than I could — I saw upon his face not the sly complacency of a man haggling over a secret, but something nearer to that which I imagine attends a man standing upon the lip of a chasm, uncertain whether the ground beneath him be rock or air. He did not ask to see the page again. He stood instead before the cold hearth, and said, in a voice from which all his easy cheerfulness had gone out like a snuffed candle, that he had known my uncle five-and-twenty years, and that there were things a man carried so long in silence that at the last he no longer knew whether he withheld them from shame or from mercy.

"Raise your eyes to me, Vane," said I, "and tell me plainly whether it was shame or mercy that scored out that entry; for I am to leave this house within the fortnight, and I would not go from it carrying a stranger's guilt upon my own account." He did not raise his eyes. He looked instead toward the window, where the sundial stood green and mute among the ruined yews, and said only that some debts were paid in full the moment they were forgiven, and that no ledger, however scarred, could afterward unforgive them. It was, I understood then, the nearest thing to a confession I should ever have from him; and it was no confession at all.

I will not pretend to you, Cornelia, that I found in the garden any of that solace which poets promise to the grieving — the blue lake, the snow-clad mountain, the tranquil wood that heals by mere contemplation; I looked upon the sundial green with lichen, the yew hedge shapeless with neglect, the cold bench where my uncle had taken his last unremembered afternoons, and felt nothing but the flat, exhausted absence where feeling should have been. Serenity itself had become a kind of accusation. The evening was fair, the sky untroubled, the light failing in its accustomed gentle manner over the black hedges; and I could summon from it no comfort, only the cold conviction that whatever had been done in that house had been done beneath just such skies, on just such evenings, while the sundial kept its patient, useless hour.

In the end I did what I think my uncle himself had done before me, though by a different instrument: I closed the ledger upon its scar, and did not open it again. I did not carry it away with me, nor did I destroy it, for I found I had not the courage for either; I left it upon the study shelf among the unread sermons, to be found, perhaps, by some later tenant with a keener eye or a colder heart than mine, and to trouble him as it had troubled me. The little sensor above the door watched me do this, as it had watched everything; and I confess I looked up at it, before I quit the room for the last time, with something almost like fellow-feeling, for it too, I thought, would go on recording long after the thing it recorded had ceased to matter to any living soul.

Vane did not come again. I heard, some months after, that he had removed to another county, to practise his gentle trade among other men's misfortunes; and I have not sought to learn whether he carries the secret still, or whether it has at last worn itself away in him, as the scored word wore itself into the paper — illegible, ineradicable, and utterly without use. I quit that house upon the appointed day, Cornelia, my fortnight spent; and I have found, as I warned you at the outset, that it was time enough to unmake a life, but none at all to explain one.