The Gateless Barrier by Lucas Malet (1900)

And thus the even turn of Malet's output stops. Up till now she had alternated quieter smaller more concentrated pieces with broader richer full canvases. This 'should' have been a full one, but isn't. There had been an indication in her last novel of her growing interest in supernatural phenomena, and this one carries that the whole distance. Laurence Rivers has come back to the family's Sussex estate from the States, where he has married well, because an old misogynist uncle is dying. Laurence is the heir. It quickly develops that a presence can be felt in an otherwise pleasant yellow drawing room at one side of the house. The room is rarely gone into and hides behind a vaguely erotic tapestry at one end of a corridor. Laurence, disturbed at first, soon becomes fascinated. The ghost is that of a beautiful young woman who flits silently, with a nervous strung-out look, around the room as though searching for something. Her wordlessness is balanced by the fact that she appears to look at Laurence with some sense of familiarity. Slowly, his interest augmenting, Laurence draws her out, sitting with her for long periods. They begin to be able to speak with each other. She begins to take on more colour, more bodily fulsomeness. At the same time, a story emerges in the background of a forebear, also Laurence Rivers, who went away to the Napoleonic wars and never came back. His young heartbroken love, a cousin sent mortally unbalanced by his death, is the ghost, Agnes. Laurence realises that he looks a lot like his namesake and that Agnes' warmth in responding to him is for that reason. He also 'realises', begins to sense, that in some way he can channel this ancestor while he's with Agnes, 'know' parts of his life, and respond to her both as his now infatuated self, and as this predecessor. Their relationship grows, her seeming 'reality' pulsates, to the point where Laurence is quite prepared to try to bring Agnes over the boundary of the door and into the now of the rest of the house, and in what he realises is now his love for her, espouse her. Of course, he is troubled internally by the flat contradiction of his existing wife in America, but has got to the point of thinking that a divorce is the only answer. Agnes submits to being lifted over the boundary of the door but immediately weakens a little, seeming to slip back to her more colourless and harried self. She has just enough energy to engage in the conversation about the future which Laurence has planned, and has him know that she will not countenance the consummation of their relationship as the facts are revealed to her. She slips back to the yellow room. Laurence goes back to America, having inherited, and hears there of a fire in the drawing room. It has revealed a hidden sepulchre built into the wall where an escritoire stood, behind which Agnes would always disappear. Her body had been entombed there unquietly by his antecedent's jealous brother Dudley, unrequited love torturing the process. There are moments when this slips a little from Malet's usual well-timed prose, drops into repetition or very occasional banality. There are also moments when it's a little too formally high-toned really to touch the emotions. But, on the whole, a fine and unusual piece.