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  THE INTOXICATED GHOST




  THE INTOXICATED GHOST
  AND OTHER STORIES

  BY
  ARLO BATES

  [Illustration]

  BOSTON AND NEW YORK
  HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
  The Riverside Press, Cambridge
  1908




  COPYRIGHT 1908 BY ARLO BATES
  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  _Published April 1908_




CONTENTS


  The Intoxicated Ghost              1
  A Problem in Portraiture          43
  The Knitters in the Sun           85
  A Comedy in Crape                117
  A Meeting of the Psychical Club  145
  Tim Calligan's Grave-Money       177
  Miss Gaylord and Jenny           207
  Dr. Polnitzski                   249
  In the Virginia Room             277




  THE INTOXICATED GHOST
  AND OTHER STORIES




THE INTOXICATED GHOST


I

It was not her beauty which made Irene Gaspic unusual, although she was
bewitchingly pretty; nor yet her wit, her cleverness, or her wealth,
albeit she was well endowed with all these good gifts: other girls were
pretty, and wise, and witty, and rich. It was something far more piquant
and rare which marked Irene as different from her mates, the fact being
that from her great-aunt on the mother's side, an old lady who for
nearly ninety years displayed to her fellow-mortals one of the most
singular characters possible, Irene had inherited the power of seeing
ghosts.

It is so generally regarded as a weakness even to believe in disembodied
spirits that in justice to Irene it is but fair to remark that she
believed in them only because she could not help seeing them, and that
the power with which she was endowed had come to her by inheritance
quite without any wish on her part. Any fair-minded person must perceive
the difference between seeing ghosts because one is so foolish as to
believe in them, and believing in their existence because one cannot
help seeing them. It might be added, moreover, that the firmness which
Miss Gaspic had displayed when visited by some of the most unpleasant
wraiths in the whole category should be allowed to tell in her favor.
When she was approached during a visit to Castle Doddyfoethghw--where,
as every traveler in Wales is aware, is to be found the most ghostly
phantom in the three kingdoms--by a gory figure literally streaming with
blood, and carrying its mangled head in its hands, she merely remarked
coldly: "Go away at once, please. You do not alarm me in the least;
but to come into the presence of a lady in such a state of unpleasant
dismemberment is in shockingly bad taste." Whereat the poor wraith fell
all along the ground in astonishment and alarm, leaving a stain of
blood upon the stone floor, which may be seen to this day by any one
who doubts the tale enough to go to Castle Doddyfoethghw to see.

Although Irene seldom referred to her inheritance, and professed, when
she did speak of it, to feel a lively indignation that her aunt Eunice
Mariamne should have thrust upon her such a bequest, she was too
thoroughly human and feminine to lack wholly a secret pride that she
should be distinguished by a gift so unusual. She had too good taste
openly to talk of it, yet she had not the firmness entirely to conceal
it; and her friends were pretty generally aware of the legacy and
of many circumstances resulting from its possession. Some few of
her intimates, indeed, had ventured to employ her good offices in
communicating with family wraiths; and although Irene was averse to
anything which savored so strongly of mediumship and other vulgar
trades, she could not but be pleased at the excellent results which
had followed her mediations in several instances.

When, therefore, she one day received a note from her old school friend
Fanny McHugh, inviting her to come down to visit her at Oldtower, with
the mysterious remark, "I not only long to see you, dear, but there is
something most important that you can do for me, and nobody but you,"
Irene at once remembered that the McHughs had a family ghost, and was
convinced that she was invited, so to say, in her professional capacity.

She was, however, by no means averse to going, and that for several
reasons. The McHugh estate was a beautiful old place in one of the
loveliest of New England villages, where the family had been in the
ascendancy since pre-Revolutionary days; Irene was sufficiently fond of
Fanny; and she was well aware, in virtue of that intuition which enables
women to know so many things, that her friend's brother, Arthur McHugh,
would be at home at the time named for the visit. Irene and Lieutenant
Arthur McHugh had been so much to each other at one time that they had
been to the very verge of a formal engagement, when at the last moment
he drew back. There was no doubt of his affection, but he was restrained
from asking Irene to share his fortunes by the unpleasant though timely
remembrance that he had none. The family wealth, once princely for the
country and time, had dwindled until little remained save the ancestral
mansion and the beautiful but unremunerative lawns surrounding it.

Of course this conduct upon the part of Lieutenant McHugh was precisely
that which most surely fixed him in the heart of Irene. The lover who
continues to love, but unselfishly renounces, is hardly likely to be
forgotten; and it is to be presumed that it was with more thought of the
young and handsome lieutenant in flesh and blood than of the Continental
major in ghostly attenuation who lurked in the haunted chamber that Miss
Gaspic accepted the invitation to Oldtower.


II

Oldtower stands in a wild and beautiful village, left on one side by
modern travel, which has turned away from the turnpike of the fathers to
follow the more direct route of the rail. The estate extends for some
distance along the bank of the river, which so twists in its windings
as almost to make the village an island, and on a knoll overlooking
the stream moulders the crumbling pile of stone which once was a
watch-tower, and from which the place takes its name.

The house is one of the finest of old colonial mansions, and is
beautifully placed upon a terrace half a dozen feet above the level of
the ample lawn which surrounds it. Back of the house a trim garden with
box hedges as high as the gardener's knee extends down to the river,
while in front a lofty hedge shuts off the grounds from the village
street. Miss Fanny, upon whom had largely devolved the care of the
estate since the death of her widowed mother, had had the good sense
to confine her efforts to keeping things in good order in the simplest
possible way; and the result was that such defects of management as were
rendered inevitable by the smallness in income presented themselves to
the eye rather as evidences of mellowness than of decay, and the general
effect remained most charming.

Irene had always been fond of the McHugh place, and everything was in
the perfection of its June fairness when she arrived. Her meeting with
Fanny was properly effusive, while Arthur gratified her feminine sense
by greeting her with outward calmness while he allowed his old passion
to appear in his eyes. There were, of course, innumerable questions to
be asked, as is usual upon such occasions, and some of them were even of
sufficient importance to require answers; so that the afternoon passed
rapidly away, and Irene had no opportunity to refer to the favor to
which her friend's letter had made allusion. Her suspicion that she had
been summoned in her capacity of ghost-seer was confirmed by the fact
that she had been put in the haunted room, a fine square chamber in the
southeast wing, wainscoted to the ceiling, and one of the handsomest
apartments in the house. This room had been especially decorated and
fitted up for one Major Arthur McHugh, a great-great-uncle of the
present McHughs, who had served with honor under Lafayette in the
Revolution. The major had left behind him the reputation of great
personal bravery, a portrait which showed him as extremely handsome,
and the fame of having been a great lady-killer and something of a rake
withal; while he had taken out of the world with him, or at least had
not left behind, the secret of what he had done with the famous McHugh
diamonds. Major McHugh was his father's eldest son, and in the family
the law of primogeniture was in his day pretty strictly observed, so
that to him descended the estate. A disappointment in love resulted in
his refusing to marry, although urged thereto by his family and much
reasoned with by disinterested mothers with marriageable daughters. He
bequeathed the estate to the eldest son of his younger brother, who had
been named for him, and this Arthur McHugh was the grandfather of the
present lieutenant.

With the estate went the famous McHugh diamonds, at that time the finest
in America. The "McHugh star," a huge stone of rose cut, had once been
the eye of an idol in the temple of Majarah, whence it had been stolen
by the sacrilegious Rajah of Zinyt, from whose possession it passed into
the hands of a Colonel McHugh at the siege of Zinyt in 1707. There was
an effort made, about the middle of the eighteenth century, to add this
beautiful gem to the crown jewels of France, but the McHugh then at the
head of the family, the father of Major McHugh, declared that he would
sooner part with wife and children than with the "McHugh star," an
unchristian sentiment, which speaks better for his appreciation of
jewels than for his family affection.

When Major McHugh departed from this life, in 1787, the McHugh diamonds
were naturally sought for by his heir, but were nowhere to be found.
None of the family knew where they were usually kept--a circumstance
which was really less singular than it might at first appear, since the
major was never communicative, and in those days concealment was more
relied upon for the safety of small valuables than the strength which
the modern safe, with its misleading name, is supposed to supply. The
last that was known of the gems was their being worn at a ball in 1785
by the sister-in-law of the owner, to whom they had been loaned for the
occasion. Here they had attracted the greatest attention and admiration,
but on their return to Major McHugh they seemed to vanish forever.
Search had of course been made, and one generation after another,
hearing the traditions, and believing in its own cleverness, had
renewed the endeavor, but thus far the mystery had remained unsolved.


III

It was when the girls were brushing out their hair together in that hour
before retiring which is traditionally sacred to feminine confidences,
that Irene asked rather abruptly:--

"Well, Fanny, what is it that you want of me?"

"Want?" replied her friend, who could not possibly help being femininely
evasive. "I want to see you, of course."

"Yes," the guest returned, smiling; "and that is the reason you gave me
this room, which I never had before."

The hostess blushed. "It is the handsomest room in the house," she said
defensively.

"And one shares it," Irene added, "with the ghost of the gallant major."

"But you know," protested Fanny, "that you do not mind ghosts in the
least."

"Not so very much now that I am used to them. They are poor creatures;
and it seems to me that they get feebler the more people refuse to
believe in them."

"Oh, you don't suppose," cried Fanny, in the greatest anxiety, "that the
major's ghost has faded away, do you? Nobody has slept here for years,
so that nobody has seen it for ever so long."

"And you want me to assure it that you think it eminently respectable to
have a wraith in the family, so you hope it will persevere in haunting
Oldtower?"

"Oh, it is n't that at all," Fanny said, lowering her voice. "I suppose
Arthur would be furious if he knew it, or that I even mentioned it, but
I am sure it is more for his sake than for my own. Don't you think that
it is?"

"You are simply too provoking for anything," Irene responded. "I am sure
I never saw a ghost that talked so unintelligibly as you do. What in the
world do you mean?"

"Why, only the other day Arthur said in joke that if somebody could only
make the major's--" she looked around to indicate the word which she
evidently did not care to pronounce in that chamber, and Irene nodded
to signify that she understood--"if only somebody could make it tell
where the McHugh diamonds are--"

"Oh, that's it, is it?" interrupted Irene. "Well, my dear, I am willing
to speak to the major, if he will give me an opportunity; but it is not
likely that I can do much. He will not care for what I say."

"But appeal to his family pride," Fanny said, with an earnestness that
betrayed the importance of this matter to her. "Tell him how we are
going to ruin for want of just the help those diamonds would give us.
He ought to have some family pride left."

Miss Gaspic naturally did not wish to draw her friend into a
conversation upon the financial straits of the family, and she therefore
managed to turn the conversation, only repeating her promise that if
the wraith of the major put in an appearance, she would do whatever
lay in her power to get from him the secret which he had kept for a
century. It was not long before Fanny withdrew, and, taking a book,
Irene sat down to read, and await her visitor.

It was just at midnight that the major's spirit made its appearance. It
was a ghost of a conventional period, and it carefully observed all the
old-time conditions. Irene, who had been waiting for it, raised her eyes
from the book which she had been reading, and examined it carefully. The
ghost had the likeness of a handsome man of rather more than middle age
and of majestic presence. The figure was dressed in Continental uniform,
and in its hand carried a glass apparently full of red wine. As Irene
raised her eyes, the ghost bowed gravely and courteously, and then
drained the cup to its depth.

"Good-evening," Miss Gaspic said politely. "Will you be seated?"

The apparition was evidently startled by this cool address, and, instead
of replying, again bowed and again drained its glass, which had in some
mysterious manner become refilled.

"Thank you," Irene said, in answer to his repeated salute; "please sit
down. I was expecting you, and I have something to say."

The ghost of the dead-and-gone major stared more than before.

"I beg your pardon?" he responded, in a thinly interrogative tone.

"Pray be seated," Irene invited him for the third time.

The ghost wavered into an old-fashioned high-backed chair, which
remained distinctly visible through his form, and for a moment or two
the pair eyed each other in silence. The situation seemed somehow to be
a strained one even to the ghost.

"It seems to me," Irene said, breaking the silence, "that it would be
hard for you to refuse the request of a lady."

"Oh, impossible," the ghost quavered, with old-time gallantry;
"especially of a lovely creature like some we could mention. Anything,"
he added in a slightly altered tone, as if his experiences in ghostland
had taught him the need of caution--"anything in reason, of course."

Irene smiled her most persuasive smile. "Do I look like one who would
ask unreasonable things?" she asked.

"I am sure that nothing which you should ask could be unreasonable,"
the ghost replied, with so much gallantry that Irene had for a moment
a confused sense of having lost her identity, since to have a ghost
complimenting her naturally gave her much the feeling of being a ghost
herself.

"And certainly the McHugh diamonds can do you no good now," Miss Gaspic
continued, introducing her subject with truly feminine indirectness.

"The McHugh diamonds?" echoed the ghost stammeringly, as if the shock
of the surprise, under which he grew perceptibly thinner, was almost
more than his incorporeal frame could endure.

"Yes," responded Irene. "Of course I have no claim on them, but the
family is in severe need, and--"

"They wish to sell my diamonds!" exclaimed the wraith, starting up in
wrath. "The degenerate, unworthy--"

Words seemed to fail him, and in an agitated manner he swallowed two or
three glasses of wine in quick succession.

"Why, sir," Irene asked irrelevantly, "do you seem to be always drinking
wine?"

"Because," he answered sadly, "I dropped dead while I was drinking the
health of Lady Betty Rafferty, and since then I have to do it whenever I
am in the presence of mortals."

"But can you not stop?"

"Only when your ladyship is pleased to command me," he replied, with all
his old-fashioned elaborateness of courtesy.

"And as to the diamonds," Irene said, coming back to that subject with
an abruptness which seemed to be most annoying to the ghost, "of what
possible use can they be to you in your present condition?"

"What use?" echoed the shade of the major, with much fierceness. "They
are my occupation. I am their guardian spirit."

"But," she urged, bringing to bear those powers of logic upon which she
always had prided herself, "you drink the ghost of wine, don't you?"

"Certainly, madam," the spirit answered, evidently confused.

"Then why can you not be content with guarding the ghost of the McHugh
diamonds, while you let the real, live Arthur McHugh have the real
stones?"

"Why, that," the apparition returned, with true masculine perversity,
"is different--quite different."

"How is it different?"

"Now I am the guardian of a genuine treasure. I am the most considerable
personage in our whole circle."

"Your circle?" interrupted Irene.

"You would not understand," the shape said, "so I will, with your
permission, omit the explanation. If I gave up the diamonds, I should be
only a common drinking ghost--a thing to be gossiped about and smiled
at."

"You would be held in reverence as the posthumous benefactor of your
family," she urged.

"I am better pleased with things as they are. I have no great faith in
the rewards of benefactors; and the people benefited would not belong to
our circle, either."

"You are both selfish and cynical," Irene declared. She fell to
meditating what she had better say to him, and meanwhile she noted with
satisfaction that the candle was burning blue, a fact which, to her
accustomed eye, indicated that the ghost was a spirit of standing most
excellent in ghostly ranks.

"To suffer the disapproval of one so lovely," the remnant of the
old-time gentleman rejoined, "is a misfortune so severe that I cannot
forbear reminding you that you are not fully familiar with the
conditions under which I exist."

In this unsatisfactory strain the conversation continued for some time
longer; and when at length the ghost took its departure, and Irene
retired to rest, she could not flatter herself that she had made any
especial progress toward inducing the spirit to yield the secret which
it had so long and so carefully guarded. The major's affections seemed
to be set with deathless constancy upon the gems, and that most powerful
of masculine passions, vanity, to be enlisted in their defense.

"I am afraid that it is of no use," Irene sighed to herself; "and yet,
after all, he was only a man when he was alive, and he cannot be much
more than that now when he is a ghost."

And greatly comforted by the reflection that whatever is masculine is to
be overcome by feminine guile, she fell asleep.


IV

On the following afternoon Irene found herself rowing on the river
with the lieutenant. She had declined his invitation to come, and had
immediately felt so exultant in the strength of mind which had enabled
her to withstand temptation that she had followed the refusal with an
acceptance.

The day was deliciously soft and balmy. A thin haze shut off the heat of
the sun, while a southerly breeze found somewhere a spicy and refreshing
odor, which with great generosity it diffused over the water. The river
moved tranquilly, and any one capable of being sentimental might well
find it hard to resist the influences of the afternoon.

The lieutenant was as ardently in love as it is possible for a man to be
who is at once a soldier and handsome, and indeed more than would have
been expected from a man who combined such causes of self-satisfaction.
The fact that Irene had a great deal of money, while he had none, gave
to his passion a hopelessness from his point of view which much
increased its fervor. He gazed at his companion with his great dark eyes
as she sat in the stern, his heavy eyebrows and well-developed mustache
preventing him from looking as silly as might otherwise have been the
case. Miss Gaspic was by no means insensible to the spell of the time
and of the companionship in which she found herself, but she was
determined above all things to be discreet.

"Arthur," she said, by way of keeping the talk in safe channels and also
of finding out what she wanted to know, "was search ever made for the
McHugh diamonds?"

"Search!" he repeated. "Everything short of pulling the house down has
been tried. Everybody in the family from the time they were lost has had
a hand at it."

"I do not see--" began Irene, when he interrupted brusquely.

"No," he said; "nobody sees. The solution of the riddle is probably so
simple that nobody will think of it. It will be hit upon by accident
some day. But, for the sake of goodness, let us talk of something else.
I always lose my temper when the McHugh diamonds are mentioned."

He relieved his impatience by a fierce spurt at the oars, which sent the
boat spinning through the water; then he shook himself as if to shake
off unpleasant thoughts, and once more allowed the current to take them
along. Irene looked at him with wistful eyes. She would have been so
glad to give him all her money if he would have it.

"You told me," she said at length, with a faint air of
self-consciousness, "that you wanted to say something to me."

The young lieutenant flushed, and looked between the trunks of the old
trees on the river-bank into the far distance. "I have," he responded.
"It is a piece of impertinence, because I have no right to say it to
you."

"You may say anything you wish to say," Irene answered, while a vague
apprehension took possession of her mind at something in his tone.
"Surely we have known each other long enough for that."

"Well," the other blurted out with an abruptness that showed the effort
that it cost him, "you should be married, Irene."

Irene felt like bursting into tears, but with truly feminine fortitude
she managed to smile instead.

"Am I getting so woefully old and faded, then, Arthur?" she asked.

His look of reproachful denial was sufficiently eloquent to need no
added word. "Of course not," he said; "but you should not be going on
toward the time when--"

"When I shall be," she concluded his sentence as he hesitated. "Then,
Arthur, why don't you ask me to marry you?"

The blood rushed into his face and ebbed away, leaving him as pale as
so sun-browned a fellow could well be. He set his teeth together over
a word which was strangled in its utterance, and Irene saw with secret
admiration the mighty grasp of his hands upon the oars. She could be
proud of his self-control so long as she was satisfied of the intensity
of his feelings, and she was almost as keenly thrilled by the adoring,
appealing look in his brown eyes as she would have been by a caress.

"Because," he said, "the McHughs have never yet been set down as
fortune-hunters, and I do not care to be the one to bring that reproach
upon the family."

"What a vilely selfish way of looking at it!" she cried.

"Very likely it seems so to a woman."

Irene flushed in her turn, and for fully two minutes there was no sound
save that of the water lapping softly against the boat. Then Miss Gaspic
spoke again.

"It is possible," she said, in a tone so cold that the poor lieutenant
dared not answer her, "that the fact that you are a man prevents you
from understanding how a woman feels who has thrown herself at a man's
head, as I have done, and been rejected. Take me back to the shore."

And he had not a word to answer.


V

To have proposed to a man, and been refused, is not a soothing
experience for any woman; and although the ground upon which Arthur had
based his rejection was one which Irene had before known to be the
obstacle between them, the refusal remained a stubborn fact to rankle in
her mind. All the evening she nursed her wounded feelings, and by the
time midnight brought her once more face to face with the ghost of the
major, her temper was in a state which nothing save the desire to shield
a lady could induce one to call by even so mild a word as uncertain.

The spirit appeared as usual, saluting, and tossing off bumpers from its
shadowy wine-glass, and it had swallowed at least a dozen cups before
Miss Gaspic condescended to indicate that she was aware of its presence.

"Why do you stand there drinking in that idiotic fashion?" she demanded,
with more asperity than politeness. "Once is quite enough for that sort
of thing."

"But I cannot speak until I have been spoken to," the ghost responded
apologetically, "and I have to continue drinking until I have been
requested to do something else."

"Drink, then, by all means," Irene replied coldly, turning to pick up a
book. "I only hope that so much wine will not go to your head."

"But it is sure to," the ghost said, in piteous tones; "and in all my
existence, even when I was only a man, I have never been overcome with
wine in the presence of a lady."

It continued to swallow the wraith of red wine while it spoke, and Irene
regarded it curiously.

"An inebriated ghost," she observed dispassionately, "is something which
it is so seldom given to mortal to see that it would be the greatest of
folly to neglect this opportunity of getting sight of that phenomenon."

"Please tell me to go away, or to sit down, or to do something," the
quondam major pleaded.

"Then tell me where the McHugh diamonds are," she said.

A look of desperate obstinacy came into the ghost's face, through which
could unpleasantly be seen the brass knobs of a tall secretary on the
opposite side of the room. For some moments the pair confronted each
other in silence, although the apparition continued its drinking. Irene
watched the figure with unrelenting countenance, and at length made the
curious discovery that it was standing upon tiptoe. In a moment more she
saw that it was really rising, and that its feet from time to time left
the carpet entirely. Her first thought was a fear that it was about
to float away and escape, but upon looking closer she came to the
conclusion that it was endeavoring to resist the tendency to rise into
the air. Watching more sharply, she perceived that while with its right
hand it raised its inexhaustible wine-cup, with its left it clung to
the back of a chair in an evident endeavor to keep itself down.

"You seem to be standing on tiptoe," she observed. "Were you looking for
anything?"

"No," the wraith responded, in evident confusion; "that is merely the
levitation consequent upon this constant imbibing."

Irene laughed contemptuously. "Do you mean," she demanded unfeelingly,
"that the sign of intoxication in a ghost is a tendency to rise into the
air?"

"It is considered more polite in our circle to use the term employed by
the occultists," the apparition answered somewhat sulkily. "We speak of
it as 'levitation.'"

"But I do not belong to your circle," Irene returned cheerfully, "and I
am not in sympathy with the occultists. Does it not occur to you," she
went on, "that it is worth while to take into consideration the fact
that in these progressive times you do not occupy the same place in
popular or even in scientific estimation which was yours formerly? You
are now merely an hallucination, you know, and there is no reason that
I should regard you with anything but contempt, as a mere symptom of
indigestion or of mental fatigue."

"But you can see that I am not an hallucination, can you not?" quavered
the poor ghost of the major, evidently becoming dreadfully discouraged.

"Oh, that is simply a delusion of the senses," Irene made answer in a
matter-of-fact way, which, even while she spoke, she felt to be basely
cruel. "Any physician would tell me so, and would write out a
prescription for me to prevent my seeing you again."

"But he could n't," the ghost said, with pathetic feebleness.

"You do not know the physicians of to-day," she replied, with a smile.
"But to drop that, what I wished to say was this: does it not seem to
you that this is a good opportunity to prove your reality by showing me
the hiding-place of the diamonds? I give you my word that I will report
the case to the Psychical Research Society, and you will then go on
record and have a permanent reputation which the incredulity of the age
cannot destroy."

The ghost was by this time in a state of intoxication which evidently
made it able only with the utmost difficulty to keep from sailing to the
ceiling. It clung to the back of a chair with a desperate clutch, while
its feet paddled hopelessly and helplessly in the air, in vain attempts
once more to get into touch with the floor.

"But the Psychical Research Society is not recognized in my circle," it
still objected.

"Very well," Irene exclaimed in exasperation; "do as you like! But what
will be the effect upon your reputation if you go floating helplessly
back to your circle in your present condition? Is levitation in the
presence of ladies considered respectable in this society of whose
opinion you think so much?"

"Oh, to think of it!" the spirit of the bygone major wailed with a
sudden shrillness of woe which made even Miss Gaspic's blood run cold.
"Oh, the disgrace of it! I will do anything you ask."

Irene sprang to her feet in sudden excitement.

"Will you show me--" she began; but the wavering voice of the ghost
interrupted her.

"You must lead me," it said. "Give me your hand. I shall float up to the
ceiling if I let go my hold upon this chair."

"Your hand--that is, I--I don't like the feeling of ghosts," Irene
replied. "Here, take hold of this."

She picked up a pearl paper-knife and extended it toward the spirit. The
ghost grasped it, and in this manner was led down the chamber, floating
and struggling upward like a bird. Irene was surprised at the amount of
force with which it pulled at the paper-knife, but she reflected that it
had really swallowed an enormous quantity of its ghostly stimulant. She
followed the directions of the waving hand that held the wine-glass,
and in this way they came to a corner of the room where the spirit made
signs that it wished to get nearer the floor. Irene pulled the figure
downward, until it crouched in the corner. It laid one transparent hand
upon a certain panel in the wainscoting.

"Search here," it said.

In the excitement of the moment Irene relaxed her hold upon the
paper-knife. Instantly the ghost floated upward like a balloon released
from its moorings, while the paper-knife dropped through its incorporeal
form to the floor.

"Good-by," Irene cried after it. "Thank you so much!"

And like a blurred and dissolving cloud above her head the intoxicated
ghost faded into nothingness.


VI

It was hardly to be expected that Irene, flushed with the proud delight
of having triumphed over the obstinate ghost of the major, could keep
her discovery to herself for so long a time as until daylight. It was
already near one in the morning, but on going to her window, and looking
across to the wing of the house where the lieutenant's rooms were, she
saw that his light was still burning. With a secret feeling that he was
probably reflecting upon the events of the afternoon, Irene sped along
the passage to the door of Fanny's chamber, whom she awakened, and
dispatched to bring Arthur.

Fanny's characteristically feminine manner of calling her brother was to
dash into his room, crying:--

"Oh, Arthur, Irene has found the McHugh diamonds!"

She was too incoherent to reply to his questions, so that there was
manifestly nothing for him to do but to follow to the place where Irene
was awaiting them. There the young couple were deserted by Fanny, who
impulsively ran on before to the haunted chamber, leaving them to
follow. As they walked along the corridor, the lieutenant, who perhaps
felt that it was well not to provoke a discussion which might call up
too vividly in Irene's mind the humiliation of the afternoon, clasped
her quite without warning, and drew her to his side.

"Now I can ask you to marry me," he said; "and I love you, Irene, with
my whole heart."

Her first movement was an instinctive struggle to free herself; but the
persuasion of his embrace was too sweet to be resisted, and she only
protested by saying, "Your love seems to depend very much upon those
detestable old diamonds."

"Of course," he answered. "Without them I am too poor to have any right
to think of you."

"Oh," she cried out in sudden terror, "suppose that they are not there!"

The young man loosened his embrace in astonishment.

"Not there!" he repeated. "Fanny said that you had found them."

"Not yet; only the ghost--"

"The ghost!" he echoed, in tones of mingled disappointment and chagrin.
"Is that all there is to it?"

Irene felt that her golden love-dream was rudely shattered. She was
aware that the lieutenant did not even believe in the existence of the
wraith of the major, and although she had been conversing with the
spirit for so long a time that very night, so great was the influence
of her lover over her mind that she began at this moment to doubt the
reality of the apparition herself.

With pale face and sinking heart she led the way into her chamber, and
to the corner where the paper-knife yet lay upon the floor in testimony
of the actuality of her interview with the wraith. Under her directions
the panel was removed from the wainscot, a labor which was not effected
without a good deal of difficulty. Arthur sneered at the whole thing,
but he yet was good-natured enough to do what the girls asked of him.

Only the dust of centuries rewarded their search. When it was fully
established that there were no jewel-cases there, poor Irene broke down
entirely, and burst into convulsive weeping.

"There, there," Arthur said soothingly. "Don't feel like that. We've got
on without the diamonds thus far, and we can still."

"It is n't the diamonds that I'm crying for," sobbed Irene, with all the
naivete of a child that has lost its pet toy. "It's you!"

There was no withstanding this appeal. Arthur took her into his arms and
comforted her, while Fanny discreetly looked the other way; and so the
engagement was allowed to stand, although the McHugh diamonds had not
been found.


VII

But the next night Irene faced the ghost with an expression of contempt
that might have withered the spirit of Hamlet's sire.

"So you think it proper to deceive a lady?" she inquired scornfully. "Is
that the way in which the gentlemen of the 'old school,' of which we
hear so much, behaved?"

"Why, you should reflect," the wraith responded waveringly, "that you
had made me intoxicated." And, indeed, the poor spirit still showed the
effects of its debauch.

"You cannot have been very thoroughly intoxicated," Irene returned, "or
you would not have been able to deceive me."

"But you see," it answered, "that I drank only the ghost of wine, so
that I really had only the ghost of inebriation."

"But being a ghost yourself," was her reply, "that should have been
enough to intoxicate you completely."

"I never argue with a lady," said the ghost loftily, the subject
evidently being too complicated for it to follow further. "At least I
managed to put you as far as possible on the wrong scent."

As it spoke, it gave the least possible turn of its eye toward the
corner of the room diagonally opposite to that where it had disappeared
on the previous night.

"Ah!" cried Irene, with sudden illumination.

She sprang up, and began to move from its place in the corner an old
secretary which stood there. The thing was very heavy, but she did not
call for help. She strained and tugged, the ghost showing evident signs
of perturbation, until she had thrust the secretary aside, and then with
her lamp beside her she sat down upon the floor and began to examine the
wainscoting.

"Come away, please," the ghost said piteously. "I hate to see you there
on the floor. Come and sit by the fire."

"Thank you," she returned. "I am very comfortable where I am."

She felt of the panels, she poked and pried, and for more than an hour
she worked, while the ghost stood over her, begging that she go away. It
was just as she was on the point of giving up that her fingers, rubbing
up and down, started a morsel of dust from a tiny hole in the edge of a
panel. She seized a hairpin from amid her locks, and thrust the point
into the little opening. The panel started, moved slowly on a concealed
hinge, and opened enough for her to insert her fingers and to push it
back. A sort of closet lay revealed, and in it was a pile of cases,
dusty, moth-eaten, and time-stained. She seized the first that came to
hand, and opened it. There upon its bed of faded velvet blazed the
"McHugh star," superb in its beauty and a fortune in itself.

"Oh, my diamonds!" shrilled the ghost of Major McHugh. "Oh, what will
our circle say!"

"They will have the right to say that you were rude to a lady," Irene
answered, with gratuitous severity. "You have wasted your opportunity of
being put on record."

"Now I am only a drinking ghost!" the wraith wailed, and faded away upon
the air.

Thus it came about that on her wedding-day Irene wore the "McHugh star;"
and yet, such is human perversity that she has not only been convinced
by her husband that ghosts do not exist, but she has lost completely the
power of seeing them, although that singular and valuable gift had come
to her, as has been said, by inheritance from a great-aunt on her
mother's side of the family.




A PROBLEM IN PORTRAITURE


I

"It does not look like him," Celia Sathman said, moving aside a
little that the afternoon light might fall more fully upon a portrait
standing unfinished upon the easel; "and yet it is unquestionably the
best picture you ever painted. It interests me, it fascinates me; and
I never had at all that feeling about Ralph himself. And yet," she
added, smiling at her own inconsistency, "it _is_ like him. It is n't
what I call a good likeness, and yet--"

The artist, Tom Claymore, leaned back in his chair and smiled.

"You are right and wrong," he said. "I am a little disappointed that you
don't catch the secret of the picture. I knew Ralph would n't
understand, but I had hopes of you."

A puzzled look came into Celia's face as she continued to study the
canvas. Her companion smoked a cigarette, and watched her with a regard
which was at once fond and a little amused.

The studio was a great room which had originally been devoted to no less
prosaic an occupation than the painting of oil-cloth carpeting, great
splashes of color, which time and dust had softened into a pleasing
dimness, remaining to testify to its former character. It stood down
among the wharves of old Salem, a town where even the new is scarcely to
be distinguished from the old, and Tom had been delighted with its roomy
quiet, the play of light and shadow among the bare beams overhead, and
the ease with which he had been able to make it serve his purpose.
He had done comparatively little toward furnishing it for his summer
occupancy. He had hung a few worn-out seines over the high beams, and
placed here and there his latest acquisitions in the way of bric-a-brac,
while numerous sketches were pinned to the walls with no attempt at
order. On the door he had fastened a zither, of which the strings were
struck by nicely balanced hammers when the door was moved, and in the
still rather barn-like room, he had established himself to teach and to
paint through the summer months.

"I cannot make it out at all," Celia said at last, turning away from
the easel and walking toward Claymore. "It looks older and stronger
than Ralph, as if-- Ah!" she interrupted herself suddenly, a new light
breaking in her face. "Now I see! You have been painting his
possibilities. You are making a portrait of him as he will be."

"As he may be," Claymore corrected her, his words showing that her
conjecture was in truth the key to the riddle. "When I began to paint
Ralph, I was at once struck by the undeveloped state of his face. It
seemed to me like a bud that had n't opened; and I began at once to try
and guess what it would grow into. I did n't at first mean to paint it
so, but the notion mastered me, and now I deliberately give myself up to
the impulse. I don't know whether it's professional, but it is great
fun."

Celia went back and looked at the picture once more, but she soon
returned to stand leaning upon the tall back of the chair in which her
betrothed was sitting.

"It is getting too dark to see it," she remarked; "but your experiment
interests me wonderfully. You say you are painting what his face may be;
why not what his face must be?"

"Because," the artist replied, "I am trying to get in the best of his
possibilities; to paint the noblest there is in him. How can I tell if
he will in life realize it? He may develop his worst side, you know,
instead of his best."

Celia was silent a moment. The darkness seemed to have gathered quickly,
rising clouds cutting off the light of the after-glow which had followed
the sunset with delusive promise. She leaned forward and laid her
finger-tips lightly upon Tom's forehead with a caressing motion.

"You are a clever man," she said. "It is fortunate you are a good one."

"Oh," he returned, almost brusquely, though he took her hand and kissed
it, "I don't know that I can lay claim to any especial virtue. Are you
remembering Hawthorne's story of 'The Prophetic Pictures,' that you
think my goodness particularly fortunate in this connection?"

Instead of replying, she moved across the studio with her graceful, firm
walk, which had won Tom's deep admiration before he knew even her name.
She took up a light old-fashioned silk shawl, yellow with time, and
threw it across her arm.

"I must go home," she remarked, as if no subject were under discussion.
"I am sure I don't know what I was thinking of to stay here so late."

"Oh, there is no time in sleepy old Salem," was his response, "so it
can't be late; but if you will go, I shall be proud to walk up with
you."

He flung away the end of his cigarette, locked the studio, and together
they took their way out of the region of wharves, along the quaint old
dinginess of Essex Street. It is a thoroughfare full of suggestions of
the past, and they both were susceptible to its influences. Here of old
the busy life of Salem flowed in vigorous current, laden with interests
which embraced half the globe; here sailors from strange lands used to
gather, swarthy and bold, pouring into each other's ringed ear talk of
adventure wild and daring; here merchants walked counting their gains on
cargoes brought from the far Orient and islands of which even the names
had hardly grown familiar to the Western World.

Hawthorne has somewhere spoken of the old life of New England as all too
sombre, and declared that our forefathers "wove their web of life with
hardly a single thread of rose-color or gold;" but surely the master was
misled by the dimness gathered from time. Into every old web of tapestry
went many a bright line of scarlet and green and azure, many a woof of
gold that time has tarnished and the dust of years dulled until all is
gray and faded. Along the memory-haunted streets of Salem, from the
first, went, side by side or hand in hand, the happy maiden and her
lover; stepped the bridal train; passed the young wife bearing under her
heart with fearful bliss the sweet secret of a life other than her own;
or the newly made mother bore her first-born son through a glory half
sunlight and half dreams of his golden future. In later days all the
romance of the seas, the teeming life which inspired the tongue of the
prophet's denouncing lyre to break into rhapsodies of poetry, the stir
of adventurous blood, and the boldness of daring adventurers have filled
these old streets with vivid and undying memories.

The artist and his companion were rather silent as they walked, he
studying the lights and shadows with appreciative eye, and she
apparently absorbed in thought. At length she seemed to come in her
reverie to some doubt which she needed his aid to resolve.

"Tom," she asked, rather hesitatingly, "have you noticed any change in
Ralph lately?"

"Change?" repeated Claymore interrogatively, with a quick flash of
interest in his eyes despite the studied calmness of his manner.

"Yes. He has n't been the same since--since--"

"Since when?" the artist inquired, as she hesitated.

"Why, it must be almost ever since we came home and you began to paint
him," Celia returned thoughtfully; "though I confess I have noticed it
only lately. Has n't it struck you?"

Her companion, instead of replying directly, began carefully to examine
the carving on the head of his walking-stick.

"You forget how slightly I knew him before," he said. "What sort of a
change do you mean?"

"He has developed. He seems all at once to be becoming a man."

"He is twenty-eight. It is n't strange that there should be signs of
the man about him, I suppose."

"But he has always seemed so boyish," Celia insisted, with the air of
one who finds it difficult to make herself understood.

"Very likely something has happened to sober him," Tom answered, with an
effort to speak carelessly, which prevented him from noticing that Celia
flushed slightly at his words.

They had reached Miss Sathman's gate, and he held it open for her.

"It was very good of you to come this afternoon," he told her. "When
will you take your next lesson?"

"I can't tell," she replied. "I'll let you know. Won't you come in?"

The invitation was given with a certain faint wistfulness, but he
declined, and lifting his hat, bade her good-night. She turned on the
doorstep and looked after him as his strong, resolute figure passed down
the street, and a sigh escaped her.

"I wonder if Tom will seem to me so reserved and cold after we are
married," was her thought.


II

People in general thought Tom Claymore's nature cold and reserved
because his manner was so. He was reticent perhaps to a fault, but
the reticent man who is cold is a monster, and Tom was far from being
anything so disagreeable as that. His was the shy artistic temperament,
and the circumstances of his rather lonely life had fostered a habit
of saying little while he yet felt deeply, and since he took life
seriously, he seldom found himself disposed to open his heart in
ordinary conversation.

Even with his betrothed he had not yet outworn the reserve which every
year of his life had strengthened, and Celia, despite her betrothal, was
not wholly free from the common error of supposing that, because he did
not easily express his sentiment, he lacked warmth of feeling. She had
been his pupil in Boston, and it was for the sake of being near her
that he had established himself at Salem for the summer, making a
pretext of the fact that he had promised to paint the portrait of her
cousin, Ralph Thatcher.

Tom Claymore could not have told at what stage of his work upon this
portrait he became possessed of the idea that he had been unconsciously
painting rather the possibilities than the realities of his sitter's
face. At first he smiled at the thought as a mere fanciful notion; then
he strove against it; but he ended by giving his inspiration, or his
whim, free rein, and deliberately endeavoring to portray the noblest
manhood of which Ralph Thatcher's face seemed to him to contain the
germs. He felt a secret impatience with the young man, who, with wealth,
health, and all the opportunities of life, seemed still too much a boy
properly to appreciate or to use them; and as the portrait advanced, the
belief grew in Claymore's mind that, when it was completed, some effect
might be produced upon Thatcher by its showing him thus vividly the
possibilities of character he was wasting. The artist did not, it is
true, attach much importance to this notion, but when once he had given
himself up to it, he at least found much interest in following out his
endeavor. The idea of a sitter's being influenced by a portrait is by
no means a novel one among painters, and Claymore took pains to have
Thatcher see the picture as soon as it got beyond its early stages. He
wanted it to have to the full whatever influence was possible, and he
was eager to discover how soon its departure from an exact likeness
would become apparent to the original.

A curious complication followed. It was not long before it began to seem
to Tom that Ralph was growing up to the ideal the portrait showed. At
first he rejected the idea as utterly fanciful. Then he recalled an
experience a brother artist had related to him in Paris, where a girl
who had been painted in the dress of a nun worn at a fancy ball, came,
by brooding over the picture, to be so possessed with a belief in her
vocation that she ended by actually taking the veil. The cases were not
exactly parallel, but Claymore saw in them a certain similarity, in that
both seemed to show how a possibility might be so strongly expressed
on canvas as to become an important influence in making itself an
actuality. He became intensely interested in the problem which presented
itself. He had before this time remarked to Celia that Ralph only needed
arousing to develop into a noble man, and he began to speculate whether
it could be within his power to furnish the impulse needed--the filament
about which crystallization would take place all at once. He worked
slowly and with the utmost care, taking pains to have Thatcher at the
studio as much as possible even on days when he was not posing, so that
the picture might be constantly before his eyes; and of one thing at
least he was sure beyond the possibility of a doubt-- Ralph was
certainly developing.

"_Post hoc sed non ergo propter hoc_," he said to himself, in the Latin
of his school debating-society days; but secretly he believed that in
this case the effect was no less "because" than "after."

On the morning after Celia had talked with her betrothed about the
picture, Ralph gave the artist a sitting. The young man seemed so
preoccupied that Tom rallied him a little on his absence of mind,
inquiring if Thatcher wished his portrait to have an air of deep
abstraction.

"I was not thinking of that confounded old picture at all," the young
man responded, smiling. "I was merely--well, I do not know exactly how
to tell you what I was doing. Do you ever feel as if the reflective part
of you, whatever that may be, had gone into its office for private
meditation and shut your consciousness outside?"

"Yes," Tom answered; "and I always comfort myself for being excluded
by supposing that at least something of real importance must be under
consideration or it would n't be worth the trouble to shut the doors
so carefully."

"Do you?" returned the sitter. "I had a jolly old clerical uncle who
used to lock the door of his study and pretend to be writing the most
awe-inspiring sermons, when he really was only having a well-fed nap.
I am afraid," he went on, with a sigh and a change of manner, "that
there is little of real importance has ever gone on in my mind. Do you
know, I am half inclined to hate you."

The artist looked up in surprise.

"Hate me?" he echoed. "Why should you hate me?"

"Because you are everything that I am not; because you succeed in
everything and I never did anything in my life; because at this
poker-table of life you win and I lose."

A strange tinge of bitterness showed itself in Ralph's voice, and
puzzled Claymore. It was not like Thatcher to be introspective, or to
lament lost possibilities. The artist rubbed his brush on his palette
with a thoughtful air.

"Even if that were so," he said, "I don't see exactly why you should
vent your disappointment on me. I'm hardly to blame, am I? But of
course what you say is nonsense anyway."

"Nonsense? It is n't nonsense. I've done nothing. I know nothing. I'm
good for nothing; and the worst of it is that the girl I've wanted all
my life realizes it just as well as I do. She is n't a fool; and of
course she does n't care a rap about me."

The confession was so frankly boyish that Claymore had a half-impulse to
smile, but the feeling in it was too evidently genuine to be ignored.
One thing at least was clear: Ralph was at last beginning to be
dissatisfied with his idle, purposeless life. He had come to the
enlightenment of seeing himself as he might look to the eyes of the
woman he cared for. The reflection crossed Claymore's mind that some
disappointment in love might have brought about whatever change he had
observed in his sitter, and that any influence which he had ascribed
to the portrait had in reality come from this. The thought struck him
with a ludicrous sense of having befooled himself. It was as if some
gorgeous palace of fancy, carefully built up and elaborated, had come
tumbling in ruins about his head. He made a gesture, half comic, half
deprecatory, and laid down his palette.

"The light has changed," he said. "I can't paint any more to-day."


III

Claymore was intensely imaginative, and he possessed all the sanguine
disposition of the artistic temperament, the power of giving himself up
to a dream so that it for the time being became real. Matters which the
reason will without hesitation allow to be the lightest bubbles of fancy
are to such a disposition almost as veracious fact; and often the life
of an imaginative man is shaped by what to cold judgment is an untenable
hypothesis. The artist had not in the least been conscious how strong a
hold the idea of awakening Ralph Thatcher had taken upon his mind, until
the doubt presented itself whether the portrait had in reality possessed
any influence whatever. He was not without a sense of humor, and he
smiled inwardly at the seriousness with which he regarded the matter. He
reasoned with himself, half petulantly, half humorously; sometimes
taking the ground that his theory had been merely a fantastic absurdity,
and again holding doggedly to the belief that it was founded upon some
fragment at least of vital truth. He recalled vaguely a good many scraps
of modern beliefs in the power of suggestion; then he came back to the
reflection that if Ralph was in love, no suggestion was needed to cause
a mental revolution.

Wholly to disbelieve in its own inspirations is, however, hardly
within the power of the genuinely imaginative nature. Whatever his
understanding might argue, Tom, in the end, would have been false to his
temperament had he not remained convinced that he was right in believing
that to some degree, at least, the picture he was painting had
influenced his sitter. Without any consciously defined plan, he got out
a fresh canvas, and occupied himself, when alone in the studio, by
copying Ralph's head, but with a difference. As in the other picture he
had endeavored to express all the noblest possibilities of the young
man's face, in this he labored to portray whatever potentiality of evil
might be found there. Every introspective person has experienced the
sensation of feeling that a course of action is being followed as if by
some inner direction, yet without any clear consciousness of the reason;
and much as might have come a hint of the intentions or motives of
another person, came to Tom the thought that he was painting this second
portrait that its difference from the first might show him upon what
foundations rested his fanciful theory. He wished, he told himself, at
least to see how far he had expressed a personality unlike another
equally possible.

As a faint shade on the artist's inner consciousness rested, however, a
feeling that this explanation was not completely satisfactory. He would
have been shocked had he even dreamed of the possibility that artistic
vanity, aroused by the doubt that it possessed the power of moulding
the life and destiny of Ralph, had defiantly turned to throw its
influence into the other scale, to prove by its power of dragging the
sitter down that its dominance was real. Had any realization of such a
motive come to Claymore, he would have been horrified at a thought so
evil; yet he failed to push self-investigation far enough to bring him
to an understanding of his real motives.

The painter worked steadily and with almost feverish rapidity, and
before the end of the week he was able to substitute the second portrait
for the first when Ralph, who had been out of town for a few days, came
for his next sitting. Tom was not without a good deal of uneasy secret
curiosity in regard to the effect upon Thatcher of the changed picture.
He appreciated how great the alteration really was, a difference so
marked that he had lacked the courage to carry out his first intention
of exhibiting the new canvas to Celia. He excused himself for hesitating
to show her the portrait by the whimsical pretext that it would not be
the part of a gentleman to betray the discreditable traits of character
he believed himself to have discovered as among the possibilities of her
cousin's nature. What Ralph would himself say, the painter awaited with
uneasy eagerness, and as the latter, after the customary greetings,
walked up to the easel and stood regarding his counterfeit presentment,
Tom found himself more nervous than he would have supposed possible.

Ralph studied the picture a moment in silence.

"What in the devil," he burst out, "have you been doing to my picture?"

"What is the matter with it?" the artist asked, stepping beside him, and
in turn fixing his gaze on the portrait.

"I'm sure I don't know," Ralph replied, with a puzzled air; "but somehow
or other it seems to me to have changed from a rather decent-looking
phiz into a most accursedly low-lived one. Do I look like that?"

"I suppose a mirror would give a more disinterested answer to that
question than I could."

Claymore glanced up as he spoke, and hardly repressed an exclamation of
surprise. Ralph's whole expression was changing to correspond with that
of the portrait before him. Who has not, in looking at some portrait
which strongly impressed him, found in a little time that his own
countenance was unconsciously altering its expression to correspond with
that portrayed before him; and the chances that such a thing will occur
must be doubly great when the picture is one's own image.

A portrait appeals so intimately to the personality of the person
represented, human vanity and individuality insist so strongly upon
regarding it as a part of self, that it stands in a closer relation to
the inner being than can almost any other outward thing. It is, in a
sense, part of the original, and perhaps the oriental prejudice against
being portrayed, lest in the process the artist may obtain some sinister
advantage, is founded upon some subtle truth. It can hardly be possible
that, with the keen feeling every man must have in regard to his
portrait, any one should fail to be more or less influenced by the
painter's conception of him, the visible embodiment of the impression he
has made upon another human mind; and since every picture must contain
something of the personality of the artist, it follows that a
portrait-painter is sure to affect in some degree the character of his
sitters. It would rarely happen that this influence would be either
intentional or tangible, but must it not always exist?

Claymore stood for a little time watching Ralph's face; then he walked
away, and returned with a small mirror which he put in the latter's
hand. Thatcher looked at the reflection it offered him, and broke into
a hard laugh.

"By George!" he said; "it does look like me. I never realized before
that I was such a whelp."

"Fiddlesticks!" Claymore rejoined briskly, taking the glass from him.
"Don't talk nonsense. Take your place and let's get to work."


IV

On the afternoon of the same day Celia came into the studio with her
face clouded. She received her lover's greetings in an absent-minded
fashion, and almost before the musical tinkle of the zither on the door
which admitted her had died away, she asked abruptly:--

"What in the world have you been doing to Ralph?"

"I? Nothing but painting him. Why?"

"Because he came down here this morning in a perfectly heavenly
frame of mind. He has been in Boston to see about some repairs on his
tenement-houses at the North End that I've been teasing him to make
ever since the first of my being there last winter; and he came in
this morning to say he thought I was right, and he was going to take
hold and do what I wanted."

"Well?" questioned Tom, as she broke off with a gesture of impatience.

"And after he 'd been down here for his sitting, he came back so cross
and strange; and said he'd reconsidered, and he did n't see why he
should bother his head about the worthless wretches in the slums. I
can't see what came over him."

"But why should you hold me responsible for your cousin's vagaries?"

"Oh, of course you are not," Celia replied, with a trace of petulance in
her tone; "but I am so dreadfully disappointed. Ralph has always put the
whole thing off before, and now I thought he had really waked up."

"Probably," Claymore suggested, "it is some new phase of his ill-starred
love affair."

Miss Sathman flushed to her temples.

"I do not know why you choose to say that," she answered stiffly. "He
never speaks to me of that now. He is too thoroughly a gentleman."

"What!" Tom burst out, in genuine amazement. "Good heavens! It was n't
you?"

Celia looked at him in evident bewilderment.

"Did n't you know?" she asked. "Ralph has been in love with me ever
since we were in pinafores. I did n't speak of it because it did n't
seem fair to him; but I supposed, of course, that was what you meant
when you spoke. I even thought you might be jealous the least bit."

Claymore turned away and walked down the studio on pretense of arranging
a screen. He felt as if he had stabbed a rival in the back. Whether by
his brush he had really an influence over Thatcher, or the changes in
his sitter were merely coincidences, he had at least been trying to
affect the young man, and since he now knew Ralph as the lover of Celia,
his actions all at once took on a different character, and the second
portrait seemed like a covert attack.

"Ralph is so amazingly outspoken," Celia continued, advancing toward the
easel and laying her hand on the cloth which hung before her cousin's
portrait, "that I wonder he has not told you. He is very fond of you,
though, he naively says, he ought not to be."

As she spoke, she lifted the curtain which hid the later portrait of
Ralph. She uttered an exclamation which made Claymore, whose back had
been turned, spring hastily toward her, too late to prevent her seeing
the picture.

"Tom," she cried, "what have you done to Ralph?"

The tone pierced Claymore to the quick. The words were almost those
which Celia had used before, but now reproach, grief, and a depth of
feeling which it seemed to Tom must come from a regard keener than
either gave them a new intensity of meaning. The tears sprang to Miss
Sathman's eyes as she looked from the canvas to her lover.

"Oh, Tom," she said, "how could you change it so? Ralph does not look
like that."

"No," Claymore answered, his embarrassment giving to his voice a certain
severity. "This is the reverse of the other picture. This is the evil
possibility of his face."

He recovered his composure. Despite his coldness of demeanor, there was
a vein of intense jealousy in the painter's nature, which tingled at
the tone in which his betrothed spoke of her cousin. He had more than
once said to himself that, despite the fact that Celia might be more
demonstrative than he, his love for her was far stronger than hers for
him. Now there came to him the conviction, quick and unreasonable, that
although she might not be aware of it, her deepest affection was really
given to Ralph Thatcher.

"Why did you paint it, Tom?" Celia pursued. "It is wicked. It really
does not in the least resemble Ralph. I suppose you could take any face
and distort it into wickedness. Where is the other picture?"

Without a word Tom brought the first portrait and set it beside the
second. Celia regarded the two canvases in silence a moment. Her color
deepened, and her throat swelled. Then she turned upon Claymore with
eyes that flashed, despite the tears which sprang into them.

"You are wicked and cruel!" she said bitterly. "I hate you for doing
it."

Tom turned pale, and then laughed unmirthfully.

"You take it very much to heart," he remarked.

The tears welled more hotly in her eyes. She tried in vain to check
them, and then with a sob she turned and walked quickly from the studio,
the zither tinkling, as the door closed after her, with a gay frivolity
that jarred sharply on Tom Claymore's nerves.


V

It was nearly a fortnight before Tom saw Celia again. For a day or two
he kept away from her, waiting for some sign that her mood had softened
and that she regretted her words. Then he could endure suspense no
longer and called at the house, to discover that she had gone to the
mountains for a brief visit. He remembered that he had been told of this
journey, and he reflected that Celia might have expected him to come and
bid her good-by. His mental attitude toward her had been much the same
as if there had been some actual quarrel, and now he said to himself
that, after all, there had been nothing in their last interview to
justify this feeling. He alternately reproached himself and blamed her,
and continually the condition of things became more intolerable to him.

His temper was not improved when Ralph, at one of the sittings, which
continued steadily, mentioned in a tone which seemed to the artist's
jealous fancy rather boasting, that he had received a letter from his
cousin. Tom frowned fiercely, and painted on without comment.

Claymore was working steadily on the second portrait, which was rapidly
approaching completion. He said to himself that if his theory was
right, and the reflection of his worst traits before a man's eye could
influence the original to evil, he would be avenged upon Ralph for
robbing him of Celia, since this portrait of Thatcher was to have a
place in the young man's home. He also reflected that in no way else
could he so surely wean Celia from an affection for her cousin, as by
bringing out Ralph's worst side. He despised himself for what he was
doing, but as men sullenly yield to a temptation against which all their
best instincts fight, he still went on with his work.

He naturally watched closely to see what effect the portrait was already
having on his sitter. Whether from its influence or from other causes,
Ralph had grown morose and ungracious after Celia's departure, and Tom
was certainly not mistaken in feeling that he was in the worst possible
frame of mind. Even the fact that his cousin had written to him did
little to change his mood, a fact that Tom, sore and hurt at being left
without letters, noted with inward anger.

The two men were daily approaching that point where it was probable that
they would come into open conflict. Ralph began to devise excuses for
avoiding the sittings, a fact that especially irritated the artist, who
was anxious to complete the work. The whole nature of their relations
toward each other had undergone a change, and all frankness and
friendliness seemed to have gone out of it. Sometimes Claymore felt
responsible for this, and at others he laughed at the idea that he had
in any way helped to alter Ralph. He was uneasy and unhappy, and when a
couple of weeks had gone by without a word from Celia, he resolved that
he would follow her to the mountains, and at least put an end to the
suspense which was becoming intolerable.

He sent word to Thatcher that he was going out of town for a few days,
packed his valise, and went down to his studio to put things to rights
for his absence. He arranged the two or three matters that needed
attention, looked at his watch, and found that he had something over
an hour before train time. He started toward the door of the studio,
hesitated, and then turned back to stand in front of the easel and
regard the nearly completed portrait of Ralph Thatcher.

It was a handsome face that looked out at him, and one full of
character; but in the full lips was an expression of sensuality almost
painful, and the eyes were selfish and cruel. The artist's first feeling
was one of gratified vanity at the cleverness with which his work had
been done. He had preserved the likeness, and scarcely increased the
apparent age of his sitter, while he had carried forward into repulsive
fullness the worst possibilities of which he could find trace in the
countenance of the original. As he looked, a cruel sense of triumph grew
in Claymore's mind. He felt that this portrait was the sure instrument
of his revenge against the man who had robbed him of the love of his
betrothed. He considered his coming interview with Celia, and so
completely was he possessed of the belief that he had lost her, that
he looked forward to the meeting as to a farewell.

At the thought a sudden pulse of emotion thrilled him. He saw Celia's
beautiful, high-bred face before him, and there came into his mind a
sense of shame, as if he were already before her and could not meet her
eyes. The sting of the deepest humiliation a high-minded man can know,
that of standing condemned and degraded in his own sight, pierced his
very soul.

"It is myself and not Ralph that I have been harming," ran his thought.
"It has never occurred to me that, even if I was dragging him down, I
had flung myself into the slime to do it. Good heavens! Is this the sort
of man I am? Am I such a sneak as to lurk in the dark and take advantage
of the confidence he shows by putting himself into my hands! Celia is
right; she could not be herself and not prefer him to the blackguard I
have proved myself."

However fanciful his theory in regard to the effect of the portrait upon
Thatcher might be, Tom was too honest to disguise from himself that
his will and intention had been to do the other harm, and to do it,
moreover, in an underhanded fashion. Instead of open, manly attack upon
his rival, he had insidiously endeavored to work him injury against
which Ralph could not defend himself.

"The only thing I have really accomplished," groaned poor Tom to
himself, "is to prove what a contemptible cur I am."

He took from his pocket his knife, opened it, and approached the
canvas. Then that strong personal connection between the artist and
his work which makes its defense almost identical with the instinct
of self-preservation, made him pause. For an instant he wavered, moved
to preserve the canvas, although he hid it away; then with desperate
resolution, and a fierceness not unlike a sacred fury, he cut the canvas
into strips. So great was the excitement of his mood and act that he
panted as he finished by wrenching the shreds of canvas from the
stretcher.

Then he smiled at the extravagance of his feelings, set the empty
stretcher against the wall, and once more brought to light the original
portrait.

"There," he said to himself, as he set the picture on the easel, "I can
at least go to her with a decently clean conscience, if I am a fool."


VI

It was well on toward sunset when Claymore reached the mountain village
where Celia was staying with a party of friends. All the hours of his
ride in the cars he had been reviewing his relations toward her. With
his imaginative temperament he was sure to exaggerate the gravity of the
situation, and he was firmly convinced that by the destruction of the
portrait he had virtually renounced his betrothed. He recalled jealously
the many signs Celia had given of her interest in her cousin, and he
settled himself in the theory that only Ralph's boyishness and apparent
want of character had prevented her cousin from winning her love.
Looking back over the summer and recalling how Thatcher had advanced
in manliness, how his character had developed, and Celia's constant
appreciation of his progress, Claymore could not but conclude, with an
inward groan, that although she was pledged to him, her affection was
really given to his rival.

Whether Celia was aware of the true state of her feelings, Tom could not
determine. Her silence of the last fortnight had perplexed and tormented
him; and he felt sure that in this time she could not have failed to
reflect deeply upon the situation. He believed, however whimsical such a
theory might seem, that his only chance of holding her was by bringing
home to her the dark side of Ralph's character, as he was convinced he
had been the means of showing her the best traits of her cousin. The
effect of the portraits had become to him a very real and a very
important factor in the case, and although he was at heart too good to
regret that he had destroyed the second picture, he was not without a
feeling of self-pity that fate had forced upon him the destruction of
his own hopes. The logical reflection that, if his ideas were true, he
had himself chosen to take up the weapon by which he was in the end
wounded, did not occur to him, and would probably have afforded him
small consolation if it had.

A servant directed him down a wood-path which led to a small cascade,
where he was told he should find Miss Sathman. As he came within sound
of the falling water, he heard voices, and pressing on, he was suddenly
brought to an abrupt halt by recognizing the tones of Ralph Thatcher.
What the young man was saying Tom did not catch, but the reply of Celia
came to his ears with cutting distinctness.

"And does it seem to you honorable, Ralph," she said, "to follow me here
and talk to me in this way, when you know I am engaged to another man,
and he your friend?"

"No man is my friend that takes you away from me!" Thatcher returned
hotly. "And besides, I happen to know you have quarrelled with him. You
have n't written to him since you came here."

"I have not quarrelled with him," Celia answered. "Oh, Ralph, I have
always believed you were so honorable."

"Honorable! honorable!" repeated the other angrily. "Shall I let you go
for a whimsical fancy that it is not honorable to speak to you? I have
loved you ever since we were children, and you--"

"And I," Miss Sathman interrupted, "have never loved anybody in that way
but Tom."

The woodland swam before Claymore's eyes. Instinctively, and hardly
conscious what he was doing, he drew himself aside out of the path into
the thicket. What more was said, he did not know. He was only aware that
a moment or two later Ralph went alone by the place where he lay hidden,
and then he rose and went slowly toward the cascade and Celia.

She was sitting with her back toward him, but as she turned at the sound
of his footsteps, the look of pain in her eyes changed suddenly into a
great joy.


VII

It was nearly a year before Tom told Celia the whole story of the two
portraits. The temptation and the effects of his paltering with it were
so real in his mind that he could not bring himself to confess until he
had made such effort as lay in his power at reparation. He finished the
original picture without more sittings, for Ralph, much to the artist's
relief, kept away from the studio. Then he left Salem, saying to himself
that his presence there might drive Ralph from home, where Tom wished
him to remain, that the influence of the face, if it really existed,
might help him.

"I do not know," Celia said thoughtfully, "whether the changes in Ralph
came from the pictures or from his disappointment; but in either case I
can see how real the whole was to you, and I am glad you stood the test;
although," she added, smiling fondly upon her husband, "I should have
known from the first that you would n't fail."

"But you must acknowledge," Tom responded, replying to the latter
portion of her remark by a caress, "that Ralph has come out splendidly
in the last year--since he has had that portrait to look at."

"Yes," she replied musingly, "and he is fast growing up to the
picture."




THE KNITTERS IN THE SUN

    _The spinsters and the knitters in the sun._
                                  _Twelfth Night_, ii, 4.


The mellow light of the October sun fell full upon the porch of the
stately old Grayman house, and the long shadows of the Lombardy poplars
pointed to the two silvery haired women who sat there placidly knitting.

The mansion dated back to colonial times. That it had been erected
before public sentiment was fully settled in regard to the proper site
of the village might be inferred from its lonely position on the banks
of the river which flowed through the little town a mile away. The
funereal poplars, winter-killed and time-beaten now in their tops,
had been in their prime half a century ago, yet they were young when
compared to the house before which they stood sentinel. From the
small-paned windows of this dwelling Graymans whose tombstones where
long sunken and rusted with patient moss had seen British vessels
sailing up the river with warlike intent, and on the porch where the
women sat knitting peacefully, Captain Maynard Grayman had stood to
review his little company of volunteers before leading them against the
redcoats, and had spoken to them in fiery words of the patriots whose
blood had but a week before been shed at Lexington. The place had still
the air of pre-Revolutionary dignity and self-respect.

As the poplars had steadily cast their sombre shadows upon the Graymans,
father and son and son's son, as generation after generation they lived
and died in the old mansion, so had the Southers no less constantly
remained the faithful servants of the family. They had seen the
greatness of the masters wane sadly from its original splendors, the
family pride alone of all the pristine glories remaining unimpaired;
they had striven loyally against the fate which trenched upon the wealth
and power of the house; and they had seen money waste, reputation fade,
until now even the name was on the verge of extinction, and the family
reduced to a bed-ridden old man querulously dwelling in futile dreams of
vanished importance and the lovely and lonely daughter who wore out her
life beside him.

As the Graymans diminished, the Southers, perhaps from the very energy
with which they strove to aid the fallen fortunes of their masters, had
waxed continually. The change which keeps from stagnation republican
society, abasing the lofty and exalting the lowly, could not have had
better illustration than in the two families. It was from no necessity
that old Sarah was still the servant of the house; a servant, in truth,
with small wage, and one who secretly helped out the broken revenues of
her master. Dollar for dollar, she could have out-counted the entire
property of her employers; and might have lived where and as she
pleased, had she been minded to have servants of her own. In old Sarah's
veins, however, flowed the faithful Souther blood, transmitted by
generations of traditionary adherents of the Grayman family; and
neither the persuasions of her children, who felt the quickening
influence of the new order of things, nor the amount of her snug account
in the village savings bank, could tempt the steadfast creature from her
allegiance. When long ago she had married her cousin, an inoffensive,
meek man, dead now a quarter of a century, she had made it a condition
that she should not abandon her service; and her position in the Grayman
mansion, like her name, had remained practically unchanged by matrimony.

She was a not uncomely figure as she sat in the October sunlight
knitting steadily, her hair abundant although silvery, and her figure
still alert and erect. From her dark print gown to the tips of her snowy
cap-strings she was spotlessly neat, while an air of mingled energy and
placidity imparted a certain piquancy to her bearing. Her active fingers
plied the bright needles with the deftness of long familiarity, and from
time to time her quick glance swept in unconscious inspection over the
row of shining tin pans ranged along the porch wall, over the beehives
in their shed not far away, robbed now of their honey, over the
smooth-flowing river beyond, and over her sister who knitted beside her.
She had the air of one accustomed to responsibility and used to watching
sharply whatever went on about her. She bestowed now and then a brief
look upon the yellow cat asleep at her feet with his paws doubled under
him, and one instinctively felt that were he guilty of any derelictions
in relation to the dairy, her sharp eye would have detected it in some
tell-tale curl of his whiskers. She scanned with a passing regard of
combined suspicion and investigation the ruddy line of tomatoes gaining
their last touch of red ripeness on the outside of the window-ledge, her
expression embodying some vague disapproval of any fruit of which the
cultivation was so manifestly an innovation on good old customs. In
every movement she displayed a repressed energy contrasting markedly
with the manner of the quiet knitter beside her in that strange fashion
so often to be found in children of the same parents.

The second woman was little more than a vain shadow from which whatever
substance it had ever possessed had long since departed. Hannah West was
one of those ciphers to which somebody else is always the significant
figure. In her youth she had been the shadow of her sister, and when
her husband departed this life, she had merely returned to her first
allegiance in becoming the shadow of Sarah Souther once more. She was a
tiny, faded creature, who came from her home in the village to visit her
sister upon every possible occasion, much as a pious devotee might make
a pilgrimage to a shrine. She believed so strongly and so absolutely in
Sarah that the belief absorbed all the energy of her nature and left her
without even the power of having an especial interest in anything else.
What Sarah Souther did, what she thought, what she said, what were the
fortunes and what the opinions of her children, with such variations
as could be rung on these themes, formed the subject of Mrs. West's
conversation, as well as of such transient and vague mental processes
as served her in place of thought. The afternoons which she passed in
aimless, placid gossip with her sister were the only bits of light and
color in her monotonous existence, to be dwelt upon in memory with joy
as they were looked forward to with delight.

"I d' know," Hannah remarked, after an unusually long interval of
silence this afternoon, "what's set me thinkin' so much 'bout George
and Miss Edith as I hev' lately. Seems ef things took hold o' me more
the older I get."

A new look of intelligence and alertness came into Sarah's face. She
knit out the last stitches upon her needle, and looked down over the
river, where a little sail-boat was trying to beat up to the village
with a breeze so light as to seem the mere ghost of a wind. The story of
the hapless loves of her son and Edith Grayman was sure to be touched
upon some time in the course of every afternoon when she and Hannah sat
together, and she was conscious of having to-day a fresh item to add to
the history.

"I had a letter from George yesterday," she said, approaching her news
indirectly that the pleasure of telling it might last the longer.

"Did you?" asked Hannah, almost with animation. "I want to know."

"Yes," Sarah answered, a softer look coming into her bright gray eyes.
"Yes, and a good letter it was."

"George was always a master hand at writin'," Hannah responded. "He is a
regular mother's son. He would n't tell a lie to save his right hand."

"No," Sarah responded, understanding perfectly that this apparently
irrelevant allusion to the veracity of her son had a direct bearing upon
the difficulties which had beset his wooing; "when Mr. Grayman asked him
if he had been makin' love to Miss Edith, he never flinched a mite. He
spoke up like a man. There never was a Souther yet that I ever heard of
that 'u'd lie to save himself."

She laid her knitting down upon her lap and fixed upon the little boat a
regard which seemed one of the closest attention, yet which saw not the
white sloop or the dingy sail with its irregular patch of brown. Some
tender memory touched the eternally young motherhood in her aged bosom,
and some vision of her absent son shut out from her sense the view of
the realities before her.

"He would n't 'a' been his mother's son if he had 'a' lied," Hannah
remarked, with a sincerity so evident that it took from the words all
suspicion of flattery.

"Or his father's either," Sarah said. "I never set out that Phineas had
much go to him, but he was a good man, and he was as true as steel."

"Yes," her sister assented, as she would have assented to any
proposition laid down by Mrs. Souther, "yes, he was that."

They sat for a moment in silence. Sarah resumed her knitting, and once
more became conscious of the lagging sloop.

"That's likely Ben Hatherway's boat," she remarked. "If he don't get on
faster, he'll get caught in the turn of the tide and carried out again."

Hannah glanced toward the boat in a perfunctory way, but she was too
deeply interested in the theme upon which the talk had touched to let it
drop, and her mind was hardly facile enough to change so quickly from
one subject to another.

"What did George say?" she asked. "You said it was a good letter."

"Yes," the mother answered, "it was a regular good letter, if I do say
it that had n't ought. He's comin' home."

"Comin' home?" echoed Hannah, in a twitter of excitement. "I want to
know! Comin' home himself?"

"I dunno what you mean by comin' home himself," Sarah replied, with a
mild facetiousness born of her joy at the news the letter had brought;
"but 't ain't at all likely he'll come home nobody else. He's comin', 't
any rate. It'll be curious to see how him and Miss Edith 'll act. It'll
be ten years since they said good-by to one another, and ten years is
considerable of a spell."

"Happen he'll be changed," Hannah observed. "Ten years does most usually
change folks more or less."

"Happen," Sarah responded, in a graver and lower tone, "he'll find her
changed."

As if to give opportunity for the testing of the truth of this remark,
the slight figure of Edith Grayman at that moment appeared at the head
of the steep and crooked stairway which led from the chambers of the old
house into the kitchen close by the porch door. She was a woman whose
face had lost the first freshness of youth, although her summers counted
but twenty-seven. Perhaps it was that the winters of her life had been
so much the longer seasons. There was in her countenance that expression
of mild melancholy which is the heritage from generations of ancestors
who have sadly watched the wasting of race and fortune, and the even
more bitter decay of the old order of things to which they belong.
She was slender and graceful in shape, with a stately and gracious
carriage, and the air of the patrician possibly a faint shade too marked
in her every motion.

As she came slowly down the time-stained stairway, her fair hair twisted
high upon her shapely head, her lips slightly pressed together, and her
violet eyes pensive and introspective, Edith might have passed for the
ghost of the ancestress whose rejuvenated gown of pale blue camlet she
wore.

The long shadows of the lugubrious Lombardy poplars had already begun
to stretch out in far-reaching lines, as if laying dusky fingers on the
aged mansion, and the sun shone across the river with a light reddened
by the autumn hazes. The knitters, as they turned at the sound of
Edith's footfall, shone in a sort of softened glory, and into this they
saw her descend as she came down the winding stair.

"Father is asleep," Miss Grayman said, stepping into the porch with a
light tread. "I am going down to the shore for a breath of air before
the night mist rises. You will hear father's bell if he wakes."

She moved slowly down the path which led toward the river, and the
regards of the two old women followed her as she went.

"She is a born lady," Sarah said, not without a certain pride as of
proprietorship.

"She is that," Hannah acquiesced. "Does she know he's comin'?"

"I just ain't had the sconce to tell her," was the response. "Sometimes
't seems just as though I'd ought to tell her, and then agen 't seems if
't would n't do no kind or sort of good. Two or three times she's sort
of looked at me 's if she had an idea something was up, but even then I
could n't bring it out."

"When 's he comin'?"

"Any day now. He was in Boston when he wrote, and he's likely to be on
the boat 'most any day."

Hannah laid down her knitting for a moment in the breathless excitement
of this announcement. The romance of young George Souther and Edith
Grayman had thrilled her as nothing in her own experience could have
done, so much more real and so much more important were these young
people to her mind than was her own personality. For ten years the tale,
brief and simple though it was, had for her been the most exciting of
romances, and the possibility of the renewal of the broken relations
between the lovers appealed to her every sense.

The story of the ill-starred loves of the young couple was really not
much, although the two gossips knitting in the sun had spun its length
over many a summer's afternoon. Young, lovely, and lonely, Edith Grayman
had responded to the love of the manly, handsome son of her nurse as
unconsciously and as fervently as if the democratic theories upon which
this nation is founded had been for her eternal verities. She had been
as little aware of what was happening as is the flower which opens its
chalice to the sun, and the shock of discovery when he dared to speak
his passion was as great as if she had not felt the love she scorned.
Indeed, it is probable that the sudden perception of her own feelings
aroused her to a sense of the need she had to be determined, if she
hoped to hold her own against her lover's pleading. She was beset within
and without, and had need of all her strength not to yield.

"She gave in herself ten years ago," Sarah commented, following the
train of thought which was in the mind of each of the sisters as they
watched Edith's graceful figure disappear behind a thicket of hazel
bushes, turning russet with the advance of autumn. "She stood out till
that night George was upset in that sail-boat of his and we thought he
was never comin' to. It makes me kind o' creepy down my back now to
recollect the screech she give when she see him brought in; an' mercy
knows I felt enough like screechin' myself, if it had n't 'a' been for
knowin' that if I did n't get the hot blankets, there wa'n't nobody to
do it. She could n't deny that she was in love with him after that."

"But she sent him off," interposed Hannah, in the tone of one repeating
an objection which persistently refused to be explained to her
satisfaction.

"Yes," Sarah returned; "that's what you always say, when you know as
well 's I do that that was to please her father; and there he lies
bed-rid to-day just as he did then, and just as sot in his way as ever
he was."

The pair sighed in concert and shook their gray heads. Of the real
significance of the romance which lay so near them they were almost as
completely ignorant as was the great yellow cat, who opened his eyes
leisurely as Hannah let fall her ball of yarn, and then, considering
that upon the whole the temptation to chase it was not worth yielding
to, closed the lids over the topaz globes again with luxurious slowness.
Themselves part of the battle between the old order and the new, the
good creatures were hardly aware that such a struggle was being waged.

"She said," Sarah murmured, bringing forward another scrap of the story,
"that she never 'd marry him 's long 's her father objected, and if I
don't know that when once Leonard Grayman 's sot his mind on a thing to
that thing he 'll stick till the crack o' doom, then I don't know
nothin' about him; that's all. She won't go back on her word, and he
won't let her off, and that's just the whole of it."

"No," Hannah agreed, sniffing sympathetically, "they won't neither of
'em change their minds; that you may depend upon."

"He'd object if he was in his coffin, I do believe," Sarah continued,
with a curious mixture of pride in the family and of personal
resentment. "The Graymans are always awful set."

"George must be considerable rich," Hannah observed, in a tone not
without a note of reverence; "he's sent you a power o' money, first and
last, ain't he?"

"Considerable," the other replied, with conscious elation. "I never used
none of it. He kept sendin' till I told him it wa'n't no manner o'
mortal use; the family would n't let me use it for them, and I had more
'n I knew what to do with anyway. I've got more 'n 'nough to bury me
decenter 'n most folks."

"Yes, I s'pose y' have," Hannah assented.

The knitters sat silent a little time, perhaps reflecting upon the
thoughts which the mention of the last rites for the dead called up in
their minds. The shadows were growing longer very fast now, and already
the afternoon had grown cooler.

Suddenly a step sounded on the graveled walk, and a firmly built,
handsome man of thirty-two or three came around the house and neared the
porch where the old women sat.

"George!" cried old Sarah, so suddenly that the cat sprang up, startled
from his dreams of ancestral mice. "Where on earth did you come from?"

"I want to know!" Hannah exclaimed, rather irrelevantly, in her
excitement dropping a stitch in her knitting.

She was instantly aware of the misfortune, however, and while the mother
and son exchanged greetings after their ten years' separation, Hannah
occupied herself in endeavors to pick up the loop of blue yarn which her
purblind eyes could scarcely see in the dimming light. When the stitch
had been secured, she proffered her own welcome in sober fashion, being,
in truth, somewhat overcome by this stalwart and bearded man whom she
remembered as a stripling. The two women twittered about the robust
newcomer, who took his seat upon the porch steps, pouring out each in
her way a flood of questions or exclamations to which he could hardly be
expected to pay very close attention.

After a separation of ten years the greetings were naturally warm, but
the Southers were not a folk given to demonstrativeness, and it was not
to the surprise of Mrs. Souther that before many minutes had passed her
son said abruptly:--

"Where is she?"

"There, there," his mother said, in a tone in which were oddly mingled
pride, remonstrance, and fondness, "ain't you got over that yet?"

"No," he responded briefly, but laying his hand fondly on that of his
mother. "Where is she?"

"Like as not she won't see you," his mother ventured.

"She sent for me."

The two women stared at him in amazement.

"Sent for you?" they echoed in unison, their voices raised in pitch.

"Yes," he said, rising and throwing back his strong shoulders in a
gesture his mother remembered well. "I don't know why I should n't tell
you, mother. She said she had been proud as long as she could bear it."

The situation was too overwhelmingly surprising for the women to grasp
it at once. Their knitting lay neglected in their laps while they tried
to take in the full meaning of this wonderful thing.

"It is n't her pride," old Sarah said softly. "'T 's his; but she would
n't say nothin' against her father if she was to be killed for it."

"Is she in the house?" he asked.

"No; she 's down to the shore," his mother answered, with a gasp.

At that moment sounded from the house the tinkle of a bell. The two
women started like guilty things surprised.

"Oh, my good gracious!" ejaculated Hannah under her breath.

"What is that?" demanded George.

"That's his bell," Mrs. Souther answered. "He wants me. You need n't
mind."

"But he must have heard--" began Hannah breathlessly. Then she stopped
abruptly.

"Do you think he heard me?" George asked.

"Oh, he 'd wake up about this time anyway," his mother said. "Besides,"
she added, with a novel note of rebellion in her voice, "what if he did?
You have a right to come to see me, I should hope."

Again the bell tinkled. Old Sarah turned to go into the house.

"You'll find her down to the shore," she repeated.

He turned away at her word, and with long, rapid strides took the path
which Miss Edith had taken earlier. The mother paused to look at him
from the threshold. Hannah knitted on with a feverish haste and a
frightened countenance. For a third time the bell called, now more
imperatively, and Sarah mounted the crooked stairway followed by the
frightened gaze of her sister.

In the cool and shaded chamber into which Sarah went, a chamber fitted
with high-shouldered old mahogany furniture, the youngest piece of which
had known the grandfathers of the withered old man who lay in the carved
bed, the air seemed to her electric with dreadful possibilities. Mr.
Grayman was sitting up in bed, his scant white locks elfishly disheveled
about the pale parchment of his face, his eyes unnaturally bright.

"Where have you been?" he demanded, with fierce querulousness. "Why did
n't you come when I rang?"

She did not at first reply, but busied herself with the medicine which
it was time for him to take.

"Whose voice did I hear?" the old man demanded, as soon as he had
swallowed the teaspoonful of liquid she brought him.

"Hannah is here," she answered briefly.

"But I heard a man's voice," he continued, his excitement steadily
mounting. "I know who it was! I know who it was!"

"Lie down," his nurse said sternly. "You know the doctor said your heart
would n't stand excitement."

"It was George!" he exclaimed shrilly. "He's an impudent--" A fit of
gasping choked him, but he struggled fiercely to go on. "If she speaks
to him, if she looks at him even, I'll curse her! I'll curse her! I'll
come back from my grave to--"

A convulsive gasping ended the sentence. He tore at his throat, at his
breast, he struggled dreadfully. Old Sarah supported him in her arms,
and tried to aid him, but nothing could save him from the effect of that
paroxysm. With one tremendous final effort, the old man threw back his
head, drew in his breath with a frightful gasp, then forced it out
again in the attempt to utter a last malediction.

"Curse--" The shrill word rang through the chamber, but it was followed
by no other. A strong, wrinkled hand, a hand that for a lifetime had
worked faithfully for him and his, was pressed over his mouth. He
choked, gasped, and then the male line of the Grayman family was
extinct.

In the meantime Hannah had been sitting on the porch, knitting like an
automaton, and staring at the yellow cat with eyes full of dazed terror.
She heard the disturbance in the chamber above, but it came to her very
faintly until that last shrill word rang down the ancient stairway. Then
she dropped her knitting in complete consternation.

"Oh, goodness!" she said aloud. "Oh, goodness gracious me!"

She was swept away completely by the sudden turmoil which had come to
trouble the peaceful afternoon. With the leveling tendencies of modern
days Hannah had become in a way familiar, as she had for a time lived
at a distance in a town of some size, and of late years in the village,
where the unruffled existence of the old Grayman place might almost seem
as remote as the life of another century. But Hannah never made any
application of modern principles to "the family." The Graymans were an
exception to any rules of social equality or democratic tendency. The
presumption of her nephew in raising his eyes to Miss Edith had always
been all but incredible to the simple old soul; and to understand that a
lady of the Grayman stock could for a moment have entertained feelings
warmer than those of patronage for a Souther was utterly beyond Hannah's
power. She had heard George say that Miss Edith had sent for him; but
she had understood it no more than she would have understood a vision
of the Apocalypse. The slow steps by which the girl had come to be
in revolt against the family traditions, to be ready to abandon her
heart-breaking resolutions, and to summon her lover, could have been
made credible to old Hannah only on the theory of madness. She sat
there in the silence which had followed that shrill cry from the
chamber of death, dazed and half cowering, unable to think or to move.

At last she saw George Souther returning alone by the river-path. The
brightness was gone from his face, and his lips were contracted sternly.

"She 's sent him away again," Hannah West said within herself. "She had
to."

The universe seemed to her to be righting itself again. Some monstrous
aberration might for a moment have come upon Miss Grayman, but the stars
in their courses were not more steadfast than the principles of the
blood. Hannah breathed more freely at the sight of her nephew's drawn
face. She wished him no ill, but she could not regard this desire of his
as not unlike that of a madman who would pluck the moon from the sky.
She instinctively accepted his evident failure as a proof that sanity
still existed in the world, and that the moral foundations of society
were still undestroyed.

"Where is mother?" George asked abruptly, as he came upon the porch.

"She ain't come down yet," Hannah answered, her thin hands going on with
the knitting like a machine.

"I don't think I'll wait," he said simply. "She'll understand."

But at that instant the figure of his mother appeared on the stairway.
She came out upon the porch, bent, gray, cowering. As her eye caught the
face of her son, however, she straightened herself and a new look came
into her eyes.

"Where is Miss Edith?" she asked abruptly.

George came to her and took her hand gently.

"Mother," he said, "you must n't blame her. She can't break her father's
heart. She has sent me away again."

His mother looked at him quietly, but with eyes that shone wildly.

"You need n't go," she announced calmly. "He is dead."

"Dead!" echoed her son.

"Dead!" cried Hannah shrilly.

"Yes," Sarah responded, with increasing calmness. "He had one of his
paroxysms. The doctor said he'd go off in one of them. You'd better go
to Miss Edith and tell her."

Hannah rose from her chair as if the feebleness of age had come upon her
suddenly.

"The doctor said he must n't be excited," she quavered. "Did he know
George was here?"

The son, who had half turned away, wheeled back again.

"Was that what killed him?" he demanded.

Old Sarah straightened herself with a supreme effort. The very strain
of uttering a falsehood and of the dreadful secret which must darken
her soul for the rest of her life gave to her words an added air of
sincerity.

"He did n't know," she said. "He went off as peaceful as a child."

Her son waited for nothing more, but once more hastened down the
river-path. Hannah stood as if transfixed.

"But, Sarah," she said, "I heard--"

Sarah looked at her with a wild regard. For a moment was silence.

"No," she said, "you heard nothing. He did not say it!"

She leaned against the doorpost and looked at her right hand strangely,
as if she expected to see blood on it. Then she stood erect again,
squaring her shoulders as if to a burden accepted.

"Be still," she said. "They're coming."

Mechanically old Hannah, bowed and bewildered, began to do up her
knitting in the fading autumnal afternoon.

"It is growing chilly," she muttered shiveringly.




A COMEDY IN CRAPE


"For my part," observed Mrs. Sterns stoutly, turning the seam of the
flannel shirt she was making for some unknown soldier, "I don't believe
any one of the three was ever really engaged to Archie Lovell. He went
round with all of them some, of course; but that was n't anything--with
him."

A murmur from the group about her told at least of sympathy with her
point of view, and assent showed itself in the remark with which Mrs.
Small continued the conversation.

"It's awful easy for a girl to put on mourning when a man's dead, and
say she's been engaged to him; but if any one of 'em had been engaged to
Archie Lovell while he was alive, she'd have bragged enough of it at the
time."

The murmur of assent was more pronounced now, and one or two of the
members of the Soldiers' Aid Society expressed in word their entire
agreement of this opinion. The ladies who made up the society usually
improved the opportunities afforded by their meetings to discuss all the
gossip of Tuskamuck, and the matter which they were now talking over in
the corner of Dr. Wentworth's parlor was one which had caused much
excitement in the little community. It was in the days of the Civil
War, and anything connected with the soldiers aroused interest, but a
combination of romance and gossip with a tragedy in the field contained
all the elements of the deepest sensation. News had come after the
battle of Chickamauga of the death of Archie Lovell, and although this
was followed by a vague rumor that he might perhaps be among the missing
rather than the killed, it had never been really disproved. As time had
gone on without tidings of the missing man, his death had been accepted,
and even his aunt, Old Lady Andrews, whose idol he had been, and who
clung to hope as long as hope seemed possible, had given him up at
last. She had ordered a memorial stone to be placed in the village
graveyard, and the appearance of the marble tablet seemed in a way to
give official sanction to the belief that Archie Lovell would never
again carry his bright face and winning smile about the village streets,
and that nevermore would he drive the gossips of Tuskamuck to the
verge of desperation by flirting so markedly with a dozen girls that
they could by no means keep track of him or decide what his real
preference--if he had one--might be.

Whatever loss the gossips sustained by his death, however, was soon made
up, for no sooner was the news of his loss known than three girls, one
after the other, announced their engagement to the dead hero, and one
after the other donned widow's weeds in his memory. So many girls had
been the recipients of Archie's multifarious attentions that it would
have been easy for almost any one of Tuskamuck's maidens to bring
forward such a claim with some show of probability; but unfortunately,
by the end of 1863 too many damsels had done this sort of thing for the
posthumous announcement of an engagement to be received with entire
solemnity or assured credence. A sort of fashion of going into mourning
for dead soldiers had set in, and undoubtedly many a forlorn damsel by a
tender fiction thus gratified a blighted passion which had never before
been allowed to come to light. Cynic wits declared that it added a new
terror to a soldier's death that he could never tell who would, when he
was unable to deny it, claim to have been betrothed to him; and when, as
in the present case, three disconsolate maidens wore crape for the same
man, the affair became too absurd even for the responsive sympathies of
war-time.

"The way things are going on," observed Mrs. Drew, a stern woman with a
hard eye, "the men are getting so killed off that the only satisfaction
a girl can get anyway is to go into mourning for some of 'em; and I
don't blame 'em if they do it."

The quality of the remark evidently did not please her hearers, who
could hardly bear any slightest approach to light speaking concerning
the tragedy in which the nation was involved.

"If it was any one of the three," Mrs. Cummings declared, after a brief
silence, "it was Delia Burrage. He used to go round with her all the
time."

"No more 'n he did with Mattie Seaton," another lady observed. "He used
to see Mattie home from singing-school most of the time that winter
before he enlisted."

"Well, anyway, when Delia presented the flag to the company the night
before they went off, he was with her all the evening. Don't you
remember how we had a supper in the Academy yard, and----"

"Of course I remember. I guess I was on the committee; but he used to go
with Mattie lots."

"He sent Mary Foster that wooden chair he carved in camp," spoke up
another lady, coming into the field as a champion of the third of the
mourners who were so conspicuously advertising their grief to an
unbelieving world.

"Well, that was a philopena; so that don't count. She told me so
herself."

The case was argued with all the zeal and minuteness inseparable from a
discussion at the Tuskamuck Soldiers' Aid Society, and at last, when
everybody else began to show signs of flagging, a word was put in by
Aunt Naomi Dexter. She had throughout sat listening to the dispute, now
and then throwing in a dry comment, wagging her foot and chewing her
green barege veil after her fashion, and looking as if she could tell
much, if she were but so disposed. Aunt Naomi scorned sewing, and was
the one woman who was privileged to sit idle while all the others were
busy. She never removed her bonnet on these occasions, the fiction being
that she had only dropped in, and did not really belong to the society;
but gossip was to Aunt Naomi as the breath of her nostrils, and she
would have died rather than to absent herself from a company where it
might be current.

"I don't know how many girls Archie Lovell was engaged to," she now
remarked dryly. "I dare say he did n't himself; and for all I know, he
was engaged to all three of those geese that are flying the black flag
for him. But I can tell you the girl he really wanted to marry, and she
is n't in black, either."

The ladies all regarded her with looks of lively curiosity and
interrogation; but she rolled the sweet morsel of gossip under her
tongue, and evidently had no intention of being hurried.

"Who is it?" Mrs. Cummings demanded at length, in a tone which indicated
that no more trifling would be endurable.

Aunt Naomi moistened her lips with an air like that of a cat in
contemplation of a plump young sparrow.

"I don't see who there is that's any more likely to have been engaged to
him than Mattie," the champion of that young lady asserted combatively.

"He'd no more have married her than he would me," Aunt Naomi asserted
contemptuously.

"Who was it, then?" Mrs. Smith demanded impatiently.

Aunt Naomi looked about on the eager faces, and seemed to feel that
interest had been brought up to its culmination point so that it was
time to speak.

"Nancy Turner," she pronounced briefly.

The name was received with varying expressions of face, but few of the
ladies had any especial comment to offer in word. Some scorned the idea,
and the champions of the three mourners still stood by their guns; but
the new theory plainly had in it some force, for the women were all
evidently impressed that in this suggestion might lie the real solution
to the vagaries of Archie Lovell's multitudinous wooing. As Mrs.
Cummings said, however, Nancy Turner was a girl who kept her own
counsel, and if she had indeed been engaged to the missing soldier,
nobody would ever be the wiser for it. It was discouraging to the
gossips to be confronted with a mystery which they could have so little
hope of ever solving, and the talk gradually turned to other topics,
this one remaining as available as ever to be taken up whenever
conversation might languish.

The Sunday following this meeting of the Soldiers' Aid Society was a
warm and beautiful spring day, which invited to the open air. Public
morality in Tuskamuck was narrow in its interpretations, and among
other restrictions it imposed was the impropriety of walking on Sunday
except by strolling in the village graveyard. The theory, if carefully
investigated, would have been found, in all probability, to have its
roots in some Puritan notion that youth in its thoughtlessness would be
sobered and religiously inclined by the sight of the grassy mounds, the
solemnly clumsy mortuary inscriptions, and the general reminders of
death. In practice the fact did not entirely justify such a theory, for
the graceless young people instinctively sought for amusement rather
than for spiritual enlightenment, chatted and laughed as loudly as they
dared, examined the epitaphs for those that might by any distortion of
their original intent be made ludicrous, and exchanged jokes in most
unsabbatical fashion. They even indulged thoughtlessly, in the very
midst of these grim reminders of a life wherein is neither marriage nor
giving in marriage, in little rustic flirtations, and eagerly picked
up morsels of gossip by sharp observation of young couples strolling
oblivious of watching eyes among the graves.

To-day the desire to see the newly set stone which had been placed
over the empty mound which was to preserve the memory of Archie Lovell
attracted an unusually large number of village folk to turn into the
graveyard after afternoon service, and an exciting whisper had gone
about that the three disconsolate betrothed damsels had all come to
church with flowers. The little groups drifted slowly through the
weatherbeaten gate behind the church, but the very first of them were
deterred by seeing a black-robed figure laying already her bunch of
geraniums on the grave. Delia Burrage, who sang in the choir, had, as
was afterward told from one end of the town to the other, slipped down
the gallery stair without waiting for the benediction, and so had
managed to be first in the field.

The gathering groups of villagers had hardly time to note with what
tender care the bereft Delia arranged her bunch of scarlet blossoms at
the foot of the still snowy marble slab than they were set aquiver with
delicious excitement by the sight of a second crape-enshrouded figure
that came to the spot, also bearing flowers. Mary Foster carried in her
black-gloved hands a cluster of white pyrethrums, a favorite house-plant
in Tuskamuck. Miss Foster came up on the side of the mound opposite to
the first comer, and humbly laid her offering below the red geraniums;
but although she was thus forced to place her flowers farther from the
stone than the other, she was evidently determined not to be outdone in
devotion. She fell on her knees, and bowed her face in her handkerchief
in a grief so dramatic that Miss Burrage was left far behind, and had
no resource but to come to her knees in turn, in a weak imitation of her
rival.

The spectators were by this time in a sort of twitter of gratified
excitement, and exchanged many significant looks and subdued comments.
Those boldest pressed nearer to the scene of action, keenly curious to
hear if word passed between the bereaved ladies. Excitement rose to
its highest when slowly down the long path came Martha Seaton, more
voluminously draped in sable weeds than either of the others. She
carried a wreath of English ivy, and a sort of admiring shudder ran
through the neighbors as they saw that to this funeral wreath Miss
Seaton had sacrificed the growth of years of careful window gardening.

"My! She 's cut her ivy!" one of them gasped.

"Why, so she has! Well, for the land's sake!" responded another, too
much overwhelmed to speak coherently.

"Trust Mattie Seaton for not letting anybody get ahead of her!" a third
commented, in accents of admiration.

Human curiosity could not keep aloof at a moment such as this, and as
Mattie advanced toward the Lovell lot, the neighbors followed as if
irresistibly impelled. They closed in a ring around the spot when she
reached it, and they looked and listened with an eagerness so frank as
almost to be excusable. They could see that the earlier comers were
watching from behind the handkerchiefs pressed to their eyes, and with
the approbation which belongs to a successful dramatic performance the
audience noted also the entire coolness with which Miss Seaton ignored
them until she stood close to the drooping pair. Then she flung back her
long veil of crape with a sweeping gesture, and with a regal glance of
her gypsyish black eyes looked first at them and then at the flowers.

"Oh, thank you so much for bringing flowers," she said, in a voice
evidently so raised that her words should be distinctly heard by the
ring of spectators. "Archie was so fond of them!"

The words gave no chance of reply, and an audible chuckle arose from the
listening throng, so obviously had her tone and manner made the other
mourners outsiders. When Mattie slowly and deliberately moved around the
headstone until she stood behind it, hung her wreath on its rounded top,
and bowed her head upon it with her handkerchief covering her eyes, she
had completely taken possession of the whole situation. As one of the
young men of the town inelegantly observed, she was "boss of that grave
and the others did n't count." As if in a carefully planned _tableau
vivant_, she stood, a drooping figure of anguish, while the other two
had become merely kneeling ministrants upon her woe.

"Well, if that ain't the beatin'est!" chuckled old Ichabod Munson,
puckering his leathery face into an ecstasy of wrinkles. "Gosh, I wish
Archie Lovell could see that. He'd be 'most willin' to get kilt for a
sight o' his three widders, an' that Seaton girl comin' it so over t'
others."

"He'd think he was a Mormon or a Turk," observed Miss Charlotte Kendall,
with her deep, throaty chuckle that not even the solemnity of the
graveyard could subdue. "He'd see the fun of it. Poor Archie! He did
love a joke."

The situation over the tombstone was one from which retreat to be
effective must be speedy. Mattie Seaton was apparently the only one to
appreciate this. But for a few moments did she remain with her forehead
bent to the slab; then she kissed the cold marble feverishly; and in
a voice broken, but still in tones easily audible to the listening
neighbors, she said to the kneeling girls:--

"Thank you so much for your sympathy;" and before they could reply she
had dropped again the cloud of crape over her face, and was moving
swiftly away up the path to the gate.

Never was exit more dramatically effective. The pair left behind
exchanged angry glances, then with a simultaneous impulse started to
their feet, and as quickly as possible got away from the sight of their
fellow townsfolk. They might be silly, but they were not so foolish as
not to know how ridiculous they had been made to look that afternoon.

It was only a few days after this that the village was stirred by the
news that Old Lady Andrews, who so mourned for Archie, who had adored
the handsome, good-natured, selfish, flirtatious dog all his life, had
gone South in the hope of recovering his remains, and of bringing them
home to rest beneath the stone she had erected. The village pretty
generally sympathized with the desire, but thought the chance of success
in such a quest made the undertaking a piece of hopeless sentiment. The
time since the news of Archie's death was already considerable, his fate
from the first had been uncertain, and the chances of the identification
of his grave seemed exceedingly small.

"I figure Ol' Lady Andrews would 'a' done better to stay to hum,"
'Siah Appleby expressed the sentiment of the town in saying. "Like's
not 'f she finds out anythin' certain,--which 't ain't all likely she
will,--she'll find Archie was just hove into a trench 'long with a lot
more poor fellers, an' no way o' sortin' out their bones short o' the
Day o' Judgment. She'd sot up a stone to him, 'n' she'd a nawful sight
better let it go at that."

The sentiment of the matter touched some, but the years of war had
brought so much of grief and suffering that most had settled into a sort
of dull acquiescence unless the woe were personal and immediate. The
neighbors sympathized with the feeling of grief-stricken Old Lady
Andrews, but so many husbands and fathers, brothers and sons and lovers,
had vanished in unidentified graves that the nerves of feeling were
benumbed. It would in the early years of the war have been unbearable to
think of a friend as lying in an unnamed grave in the South; now it
seemed simply a part of the inevitable misery of war.

The "three widows," as the village folk unkindly dubbed them, were less
in evidence after the episode in the graveyard. They avoided each other
as far as possible, and were evidently not unaware that they were not
taken very seriously by their neighbors. They perhaps knew that jests at
their expense were in circulation, like the grim remark of Deacon Daniel
Richards, that he did not see how any one of them could claim more than
a "widow's third" of Archie's memory. They kept rather quiet, at least;
and the weeks went by uneventfully until the departure of Old Lady
Andrews again drew attention to the story.

The old lady went alone, and once gone she sent no word back to tell
how she fared on her quest. Now that her nephew was missing, she had
no immediate family; and she wrote to none of her townsfolk. The spring
opened into summer as a bud into a flower, and life at Tuskamuck went
on with its various interests, but no one was able to do more than to
speculate upon her movements or her success.

One afternoon in June the Soldiers' Aid Society came together for its
weekly gathering in the vestry. The meeting had been appointed at the
house of the Widow Turner, but Nancy Turner had been suddenly called out
of town, and her mother, somewhat of an invalid, had not felt equal to
the task of entertaining without her. The bare room, with its red pulpit
and yellow settees, had a forlorn look, despite the groups of busy women
and girls scattered over it; but its chilling influence could not check
the flow of conversation.

"Did you hear where Nancy Turner's gone?" one woman asked of the group
in which she sat. "She must have gone very suddenly."

"I understood there was sickness somewhere," another responded vaguely.

"Maybe it's her aunt over at Whitneyville," a third suggested. "Mis'
Turner told me in the spring she was real feeble."

"Mis' Turner herself 's real frail. She did n't feel well enough to come
this afternoon."

"Where 's Aunt Naomi?" inquired Mrs. Cummings. "It's 'most five
o'clock, and she almost always comes about three."

"Oh," responded Mrs. Wright, with a laugh and her quick, bright glance,
"you may depend upon it she's getting news somewhere. She'll come in
before we go home, with something wonderful to tell."

As if in intentional confirmation of the words, Aunt Naomi at that
moment appeared in the doorway. Her shrewd old face showed satisfaction
in every wrinkle, and from beneath the unfailing veil of green barege
draped from her bonnet over the upper left-hand corner of her face her
eyes positively twinkled. She took a deliberate survey of the room, and
then with her peculiar rocking gait moved to the group which had been
discussing her absence.

"Good afternoon, Aunt Naomi," Mrs. Cummings greeted her. "We were just
wondering what had become of you."

"And I said," put in Mrs. Wright audaciously, "that you must be getting
some wonderful piece of news."

Aunt Naomi hitched up her shawl behind with a grasshopper-like motion of
her elbows, and sat down with a wide grin.

"Well, this time you were right," she said. "I was hearing Old Lady
Andrews tell about her trip."

"Old Lady Andrews?" echoed the ladies. "Has she got home?"

"Yes; she got here this noon."

"And nobody but you knew it!" ejaculated Mrs. Cummings.

They all regarded Aunt Naomi with undisguised admiration, in every look
acknowledging her cleverness in discovering what had been hid from the
rest of the village. She smiled broadly, and seemed to drink in the
sweet odor of this surprise and their homage as an idol might snuff up
grateful fumes of incense.

"Did she bring home the body?" Mrs. Cummings asked after a moment, in a
voice becomingly lowered.

"Yes, she did," Aunt Naomi answered, with a chuckle of levity which
seemed almost indecent. "She had a dreadful time finding out anything;
but she had friends at Washington--her husband had cousins there, you
know--and at last she got on the track."

"Where was he buried?"

Aunt Naomi paused to wag her foot and to nibble at the corner of her
green veil in a way common to her in moments of excitement. She looked
around in evident enjoyment of the situation.

"He was n't buried anywhere," she said, with a grin.

"Why not?" demanded Mrs. Wright excitedly.

"Because he was n't dead."

"Was n't dead?"

"No; only taken prisoner. He was wounded, and he's been in Libby."

"How is he now?"

"Oh, he's all right now. He's coming over here to show himself, and see
his friends."

The words were hardly spoken when in the doorway appeared the well-known
figure of Archie Lovell. He wore the uniform of a lieutenant, he was
pale and worn, but handsomer than ever. On his arm was a blushing damsel
in a hat with a white feather, her face all smiles and dimples. An
exclamation went up from all over the room.

"Why, it's Archie Lovell!"

It was followed almost immediately by another:--

"And Nancy Turner's with him!"

"No; it's Nancy Lovell," announced Aunt Naomi, in a voice audible all
over the vestry. "They were married in Boston."

The bridal couple advanced. All about the room the ladies rose, but
instead of greeting the newcomers, they looked at the "three widows,"
and waited as if to give them first an opportunity of accosting their
mate, thus returned as if from the very grave, and so inopportunely
bringing another mate with him. Miss Burrage and Miss Foster shrank from
sight behind the backs of those nearest to them; but Mattie Seaton swept
impulsively forward with her hand extended cordially. Her crisp black
hair curled about her temples, her eyes shone, and her teeth flashed
between her red lips.

"Why, Archie, dear," she said, in her clear, resonant voice, "we thought
we had lost you forever. We all supposed you were dead, and here you are
only married. Let me congratulate you, though after being engaged to
so many girls, it must seem queer to be married to only one!--and you,
Nancy," she went on, before Archie could make other reply than to shake
hands; "to think you got him after all, just because you went ahead and
caught him! I congratulate you with all my heart; only look out for him.
He'll make love to every woman he sees."

She bent forward and kissed the bride before Mrs. Lovell could have
known her intention, and turned quickly.

"Come, Delia," she called across the vestry; "come, Mary! There's
nothing for us to do but to go home and take off our black. We may have
better luck next time!"

With this ambiguous observation, which might have been construed to
cast rather a sinister reflection upon the return to life of the young
lieutenant, she swept out of the vestry, complete mistress of the
situation; and although Archie Lovell always strenuously denied that he
had ever been engaged to any woman besides the one he married, a general
feeling prevailed in Tuskamuck that no girl could have carried it off
with a high hand as Mattie did, if she had not had some sort of an
understanding to serve her as a support.

But never again while the Civil War lasted did a girl in Tuskamuck put
on black for a lover unless the engagement had been publicly recognized
before his death.




A MEETING OF THE PSYCHICAL CLUB


I

The meeting of the Psychical Club had been rather dull, and it was just
as the members were languidly expecting an adjournment that the only
interesting moment of the evening came. The papers had been more than
usually vapid, and, as one man whispered to another, not even a ghost
could be convicted upon evidence so slight as that brought forward to
prove the existence of disembodied visitants to certain forsaken and
rat-haunted houses. At the last moment, however, the President, Dr.
Taunton, made an announcement which did arouse some attention.

"Before we go," he said, smiling with the air of one who desires it to
be understood that in what he says he distinctly disclaims all personal
responsibility, "it is my duty to submit to the Club a singular
proposition which has been made to me. A gentleman whom I am not at
liberty to name, but who is personally known to many--perhaps to
most--of you, offers to give to the Club an exhibition of occult
phenomena."

The members roused somewhat, but too many propositions of a nature not
dissimilar had ended in entire failure and flatness for any immediate
enthusiasm.

"What are his qualifications?" a member asked.

"I did not dream that he possessed any," Dr. Taunton responded, smiling
more broadly. "Indeed, to me that is the interesting thing. I had never
suspected that he had even the slightest knowledge or curiosity in such
matters, and still less that he made any pretensions to occult powers.
The fact that he is a man of a position so good and of brains so well
proved as to make it unlikely that he would gratuitously make a fool of
himself is the only ground on which his proposition seems to me worth
attention."

"What does he propose to do?"

"He does not say."

"He must have given some sort of idea."

"He said only that he was able to perform some tricks--experiments, I
think, was his word; or no--he said demonstrations. He thought they
would interest the members."

"Did he say why he offered to do them?"

"No further than to observe not over politely that he was weary of some
of the nonsense the Club circulated, and that he would therefore take
the trouble to teach them better."

The members smiled, but some  a little as if the touch had
reached a spot somewhat sensitive.

"It is exceedingly kind of him," one elderly gentleman remarked stiffly.

"He is explicit in his conditions," the President added.

The members were beginning to seem really awake, and Judge Hobart asked
with some quickness what the conditions were.

"First," the President answered, "that his identity shall not be
revealed. I am not to tell his name, and he trusts to the honor of any
member who may recognize him. A meeting is to be appointed when and
where we please. He is to know nothing more than the time. I am to send
a carriage for him, to provide certain things of which he has given me a
list, to arrange a room according to his directions, and to give him my
word that no record of the meeting shall appear in the newspapers."

"Are the things he wishes difficult to procure?"

"This is the list," said Dr. Taunton, taking a paper from his pocket.
"You will see that they are all sufficiently simple.

"'Two rings of iron, four or five inches in diameter, interlocked and
welded firmly.

"'A ten-inch cube of hard wood.

"'A six-inch cube of iron.

"'A sealed letter, written by some member.

"'A carpenter's saw.

"'A gold-fish globe ten inches or so across.

"'Three smaller globes, one filled with red, one with blue, and one
with a colorless liquid.

"'A scale on which a man may be weighed.

"'A stick of sealing-wax.

"'A flower-pot filled with earth.

"'An orange seed.'"

"The articles are simple enough," Judge Hobart commented. "Are the
arrangements required difficult?"

"No. He asks for a committee to examine him in the dressing-room; a
platform insulated with glass and some substance he will furnish, and a
little matter of the arrangement of lights that is easy enough."

The members of the Club meditated in silence for a moment, and then
Professor Gray spoke.

"It must depend, it seems to me," he said, "on the sort of a man your
mysterious magician is. If he is a person to be trusted, I should say
go ahead."

"He is a gentleman," the President answered; "a man of social standing,
money, education, and with a reputation in his special branch of
knowledge both here and in Europe. If I named him, you would, I feel
sure, give him a hearing without question."

"What is his specialty?" one member inquired.

"I hardly think it would be fair for me to tell. It would possibly be
too good a clue to his identity."

"Is it fair to ask if it is connected with any psychical branch?"

"Not in the least. I think I said at the start that I never suspected
him of any interest in such subjects. He was asked to join this Club,
and declined."

"Did he give any particular reason?"

The President smiled satirically.

"He said it would never accomplish anything."

"Perhaps that shows his common sense," Judge Hobart observed dryly. "I
am bound to say that it has not accomplished much thus far. What I do
not understand is why at this late day he takes an interest in our
work."

"He did n't go into that. He did not seem especially anxious. He merely
told me that he was willing to show the Club certain things, and named
his conditions. That is about the whole of it."

"Well," observed Judge Hobart, with his air of burly frankness, "I vote
we have him. The only reason for shying off is that so many fellows,
otherwise sensible, lose their heads the moment they try to investigate
anything psychical."

"Is that a reflection on our Club?" Professor Gray asked good-naturedly.

In the end the decision was that the President should be instructed to
make arrangements with the unknown, and an evening was chosen for the
meeting. The place was left to the President, to be imparted to the
members confidentially on the day appointed. Then the gentlemen went
their several ways, each, except the President who knew, speculating
upon the possible identity of the mysterious wonder-worker.


II

When the clock struck eight on the evening appointed, the members of the
Club were all present. The room to which they had been summoned by Dr.
Taunton was simply furnished with a table, before which the seats were
arranged in a semicircle, and behind which was a small platform on which
stood a single chair. This platform was raised on blocks of glass, above
which were thin slabs of a substance which to the eye seemed like a sort
of brown resin, in which were to be discerned sparkles of yellow, as of
minute crystals. The chair was in turn insulated in the same manner,
while before it for the feet of the performer was placed a slab of glass
covered with the same resinous substance. On the chair lay a thick robe
of knitted silk. Beneath the table was a trunk containing the articles
of which the President had read a list at the previous meeting.

The members examined everything and handled everything except the
platform and the chair upon it. These they were especially requested
not to touch. At five minutes past eight a carriage was heard to stop
outside, and almost immediately the President came in.

"The gentleman is in the dressing-room," he said, "and is ready for the
examining committee. If the members will be seated, we shall be prepared
to receive him."

The members took their seats, and there was a brief interval of silence.
Then Judge Hobart and Professor Gray, who had gone to the dressing-room,
reentered. Between them was a tall man, well formed, rather slender,
but showing in his figure some signs of approaching middle age. He wore
simply a single garment of knit silk. It was laced in the back, and
fitted him so tightly that the play of his muscles was as evident as it
would have been in a nude figure. His face was covered down to the lips
by a black mask of silk.

The unknown stepped out of the loose slippers he wore, mounted the
platform, put on the silk robe, and sat down in the chair. Judge Hobart
made a formal statement that the perfor-- that their guest had neither
properties nor apparatus concealed about his person. Then he sat down,
and silence filled the room.

"We are ready," President Taunton said.

The stranger smoothed from his lips the smile which had curled them when
Judge Hobart so nearly spoke of him as the "performer." He rose, and
stood on the slab before his chair.

"I must say a word or two by way of preface," he began, in a voice
cultivated and pleasant. "In the first place, I have no concealed motive
in coming here to-night. I am not even--as I shall convince you before
we are done--gratifying my vanity by advertising my powers. It has
seemed to me that the Club is not on the right track, and although in
one sense it is none of my business, I am interested in the subject
which it is, as I understand, the object of this body to investigate.
The paper by Judge Hobart in a recent number of the 'Agassiz Quarterly'
decided me to show to him that certain forces which he conclusively
proves to be non-existent do, nevertheless, exist. As I am personally
known to perhaps half the gentlemen in the room, and am likely to meet
some of them not infrequently, I take the liberty of asking that if any
one shall chance to recognize me, he will remember that I come on the
condition that my identity remain concealed. The President," he
continued, "will bear me out when I say that I have not seen the things
provided for use this evening, and that I had no knowledge of the place
appointed for the meeting. The dressing-gown I sent him because the
scantiness of my dress makes it rather a necessity. I presume that he
has examined it carefully enough to be sure that it is innocent of
witchery and of trickery."

He paused for a moment, and then in a tone somewhat more determined went
on.

"One thing I must add. I decline to answer any questions whatever in
regard to the means which produce the effects to which I shall call
your attention. Those from whom I have learned would be sufficiently
unwilling that I exhibit my power at all, and were there no other
reason, their wishes would be sufficient to prevent me from offering
information or explanation. I may not succeed in doing all that I shall
attempt. I have laid out a pretty serious evening's work, especially for
one who lives as I do amid unfavorable conditions; and of course I can
receive no assistance from my audience."

He took off the dressing-gown and dropped it into the chair. Then he
removed from his finger a large seal ring, and laid it between his feet
on the resinous slab.

"I wish to show you first," the stranger said, "that if I chose, I could
manage to deceive you into thinking that I accomplished much that I did
not really do. For instance, I perhaps at this moment look to you like
an elephant."

The members of the Psychical Club gasped in astonishment. Surely upon
the platform stood a large white elephant, twisting his pink trunk.

"Or a palm tree," they heard the voice of the stranger say.

No; not an elephant stood on the platform, but a tall and graceful
date-palm, crowned with a splendid cluster of spreading fronds.

"Or Dr. Taunton."

The members looked in amazement from the figure of the President sitting
in his chair, twirling his gold eye-glasses with his familiar gesture,
and his double on the platform, as faithful as a reflection in a mirror,
doing the same thing.

"But all this is mere illusion," the voice went on; "I am none of these
things."

Once more they saw only the silken-clad figure, tall and supple, smiling
under the black mask.

"What I profess to do," the speaker continued, "I shall really do, and
not depend upon cheating your senses. I shall hope to leave you proofs
and evidences to establish this completely. The difficulty of the
different expositions of force is not to be judged by appearances.
First, for instance, I shall show you an exceedingly simple and easy
thing. It has come to be customary, for some foolish reason, to speak of
these phenomena as illustrations of the 'fourth dimension.' The term, I
suppose, is as good as another, since it certainly conveys no definite
idea whatever to people in general. I will ask a couple of gentlemen
to take a pair of interlocked iron rings that I suppose are among the
articles prepared, and to bring them to me. I do not wish to leave my
insulation, as in later trials I shall need all my force."

The rings were taken from the trunk and brought forward. They were of
iron as thick as a man's thumb, were linked together, and firmly welded.
To pull them apart would have been impossible for teams of strong
horses. By the direction of the stranger they were held before him by
the two gentlemen.

"I have asked Dr. Taunton," he said, "to have the rings privately
marked, so as to insure against any possible suspicion of substitution.
I have never seen them."

He leaned forward, and laid his hand lightly on the junction of the
rings. They fell apart instantly. Both were unbroken; and neither gave
the slightest appearance of strain or rupture. A murmur of surprise
circled the room, and then the members of the Club broke into hearty
applause.

The stranger laughed frankly.

"I thank you, gentlemen," he said good-humoredly; "but I am not a
juggler."

He asked next for the cube of wood and for the sealed letter.

"I have never seen either of these," he said, the phrase being repeated
almost with a mechanical indifference. "I suppose that the President or
the person who wrote the letter can identify the note wherever he finds
it."

At his direction President Taunton held up before him the cube with the
letter lying upon it. The stranger laid his hand over the letter, and
then showed an empty palm toward the audience.

"You see I have not taken the letter," he said. "If the saw is there,
please cut the block in two in the middle. Cut it across the grain."

While the sawing was going on, the magician put on his wrap and sat
down. He resumed his signet ring, and sat with his head bowed in his
hands. When the block had been divided, the ends of the letter, cut in
halves, appeared in the midst of the wood.

"I think," the stranger said, "that the two halves of the note will slip
out of the envelope without difficulty, and Dr. Taunton will then be
able to say whether it is the original letter or not."

The president with a little trouble pulled out the pieces of paper and
fitted them together. He examined them critically, even using a
pocket-glass.

"If I had not been deceived earlier in the evening, and if I did not
know that it is wildly impossible," he said, "I should say that this is
my letter."

"'I believe because it is impossible,'" quoted the stranger. "You may
keep the pieces and decide at your leisure."

He rose as he spoke, and once more threw off his robe. The Club waited
breathless. He again placed the ring between his feet.

"I wish now," he said, "the three globes filled with  fluid."

These were brought to him on a tray, and at his bidding placed close
together in a triangle.

"This is only another of the innumerable possible variations upon the
penetrability of matter, and would come under the head in common
nomenclature of that stupidly used term 'fourth dimension.' I said that
I am not a juggler, but of course I chose some of the tests because they
are picturesque, and so might amuse an audience. See."

He laid his hand upon the top of the three globes. Instantly they became
one by intersection, the three bases being moved nearer together. Each
globe preserved perfectly its shape, and in the divisions now made by
the coalescing of the section of one sphere with that of another the
liquid was of the hue resulting from a mingling of the colors of the
differently tinted fluids.

A murmur went around. Several of the members rose to examine the globes.

"Put them on the table," the wonder-worker said, "and then everybody may
see."

"We are not to ask questions of methods," Judge Hobart observed. "Is it
proper to inquire whether the experiment involves a contradiction of the
old law that two bodies cannot occupy the same space?"

"Not at all," was the answer. "Modern science has shown clearly enough
that to seem to occupy space is only to fill it as the stars fill the
sky. I have only taken advantage of that fact to crowd more matter into
a defined area."

The members were asked to seat themselves, and when this had been done,
the stranger said: "Any number of examples of this power could be given,
but these should be enough, unless some one would prefer to improvise a
test on the spot."

"I am glad that you say this," Professor Gray remarked. "I am subject to
the prejudice, foolish enough but common, of being more impressed by
experiments of my own contriving. Do you mind, sir, if Dr. Taunton and I
loop handkerchiefs together, and let you separate them while we hold the
ends?"

"Certainly not," was the reply.

The experiment was instantly successful, and was repeated for double
assurance.

"If we had nothing else to do," the stranger observed, "we might go on
in this line indefinitely; but this is enough of the 'fourth dimension,'
so called. Now we will try development."


III

The flower-pot filled with earth was placed upon the slab at the feet of
the magician. The orange seed was laid upon the earth.

"So ingenious an explanation has recently been given--or, more exactly,
recently revived--of the development of a plant from a seed, that you
may suppose me to have all the different pieces of an orange grove
concealed about me, despite the fact that my dress is not adapted to
the concealment of a needle. However, you may judge for yourselves."

He leaned forward, and with the point of his finger pushed the seed into
the earth.

"Will some one cover the pot with a handkerchief?" he said. "Please be
careful not to touch me or it. Hold the handkerchief out, and drop it."

One of the members followed the directions, and for a moment the
stranger sat quiet, his eyes fixed on the covered flower-pot. The centre
of the handkerchief was seen gradually to rise, and when the cloth was
lifted, the astonished eyes of the Club beheld a glossy shoot, three or
four inches in height. Without again covering it, the magician continued
to gaze fixedly upon the plant. Before the eyes of the spectators the
shoot became a shrub, the shrub a tree; the fragrance of orange blossoms
filled the air, and among the shining leaves began to swell the golden
fruit. The time had been numbered only in minutes, yet there stood a
tree higher than a man's head, and laden with golden globes.

"Take it away," the wonder-worker said, "and let me rest a little before
I try anything more. You will find the tree to-morrow, and I think you
will concede that it is too bulky to have been concealed under these
fleshings. If you think it only an optical delusion or the result of
hypnotism, try to-morrow by the senses of persons who do not know how it
was produced."

He sat for some moments with his head bowed in his hands. Then at his
direction a globe about a foot in diameter was filled with clear water
and placed on the table. The lights were then turned down so as to leave
all the room in shadow except the platform.

"I must ask you to be as quiet as possible," the magician requested.
"The experiment is a difficult one, and from living in the atmosphere
which surrounds my daily life I am out of the proper condition."

Putting his hands behind him, he sank downward on the slab to his knees,
and so reached forward as to press his thumbs upon his great toes.
The position was a singular one, and earlier in the evening might have
raised a smile. Now all was breathless silence for a couple of moments.
Then the stranger sprang suddenly to his full height, and directed his
forefinger with a violent movement toward the globe. A spark of violet
light not unlike that from an electric battery flashed from the
outstretched finger to the globe, and was seen to remain like a star
in the midst of the water.

From this violet centre, with slow, sinuous movement, numerous filaments
of light grew out in the liquid, until the globe was filled with tangled
and intertwined threads like the roots of a hyacinth in its glass.
Slowly, slowly, the nucleus rose to the surface, dragging the threads
behind it. Then above the water began to form a faint haze. With gradual
motion it mounted, absorbing by degrees the fire from the phosphorescent
fibres which served for its roots, until a faintly luminous pillar of
dully glowing mist four or five feet high showed above the mouth of the
globe.

The magician made strange gestures, and a slow rotary motion was
discerned in the cloud. Without abrupt or definitely marked alteration
the pillar was modified in shape until more and more plainly was evident
a resemblance to the human form. He rose to his full height, and
extended both his hands toward the figure. Slowly it detached itself
from the water and from the globe, and floated in the air, the perfect
shape of a woman, transparent, faintly luminous, but with a lustre
less cold than at first. One of the men drew in his breath with a deep
and audible inspiration. The shape wavered, and another spectator
impulsively cried "Hush!" The word seemed to break the spell. The
wonderful visionary form trembled, shivered, and its exquisite beauty
melted in the air.

The magician resumed his seat with visible disappointment.

"I am sorry," he said. "I am already tired, and you distracted my
attention. The experiment has failed. May the lights be turned up,
please."

A murmur of disappointment ran around the room.

"I am sorry," he repeated. "I should have impressed on you more strongly
the need of absolute quiet. I am not quite up to beginning this over
again. Let me show you the opposite--disintegration. It is easier to
tear down than to build up."

The block of iron he had asked for was by his direction laid on the
floor in front of the platform. The magician sat for a moment with
closed eyes, his hands laid palm to palm upon his knees. Then with an
abrupt movement he pointed his two forefingers, pressed together, toward
the cube. A report like that of a pistol startled the members, and the
solid iron shivered into almost impalpable dust. The members of the Club
crowded together to the spot.

"Please do not touch my platform," he requested, as he had earlier in
the evening. "I must still show you something more."


IV

"Levitation is a phenomenon which is common enough," he said by way of
preface, "but our examination would by no means be complete without it.
Of course I am only touching upon a few of the less subtle principles
that underlie what is commonly misnamed occultism; but this is one of
the obvious ones. Please let some heavy man step upon the scales."

Judge Hobart was with some laughter persuaded to take his place upon the
platform of the scales, and the indicator marked a weight of two hundred
and six pounds.

"Will you look again?" the stranger asked of the gentleman who had read
the number.

"Why, he weighs nothing!" the weigher exclaimed, in astonishment.

"His weight has broken the scales," another member declared.

"You may think," the magician went on, "that I have bewitched the
spring. Will somebody lift the Judge?"

Professor Gray, who happened to stand nearest, put out one hand and
picked the venerable Judge up as easily as he would have lifted a
pocket-handkerchief. As he took his victim by the collar, the effect
did not tend toward solemnity.

"What do you mean, sir?" demanded the Judge. "Put me down, sir, at
once."

The stranger made a little sign with his hand. The Professor saw and
understood, so instead of putting Judge Hobart down, he lightly tossed
the rotund figure upward. The Judge, probably more to his amazement than
to his satisfaction, found himself floating in the air with his head
against the ceiling, and with his legs paddling hopelessly as if he
were learning to swim. The other members shouted with laughter.

"That will do," the magician said. "I did not mean to turn things into
a farce."

The ponderous form of Judge Hobart floated softly to the floor; his face
showed a wonderful mixture of bewilderment, wounded vanity, and relief.

"It's very warm at the top of the room," he said, wiping his red
forehead; "very warm. Heat rises so."

"Other things rise also at times," somebody said.

Everybody laughed, and then the members settled into quiet again, and
listened to the magician.

"Examples of this sort are infinite in number, but one is as good as
many. The principle is everywhere the same. Levitation is really too
simple a matter to occupy more of our time. The transporting of matter
through space and through other matter is more interesting and more
important. It is also more difficult, and consequently less common.
Some time ago it was proposed in London, as a test of the reality of
occultism, that a copy of an Indian paper of any given date be produced
in London on the day of its publication in Calcutta. The test was
shirked by those who are advertising themselves by pretending to powers
which they did not have, and those who were able to do the feat had no
interest in helping to bolster up a sham. That the thing was easily
possible is the last fact with which I shall trouble you to-night. Allow
me to offer you a copy of the 'London Times' of this morning."

As he spoke, a newspaper fluttered from the air above, and fell upon the
table. The stranger checked a movement which Judge Hobart made to
examine it.

"Let me seal it first," he said. "It will make future identification
surer. Please lay it with that stick of sealing-wax on the platform."

When this had been done, he took the wax and held it above the paper.
The wax melted without visible cause, and dropped on the margin of the
journal. Leaning forward, the magician pressed his seal into the red
mass, and then flung the paper again on the table.

"It will be easy," he remarked, "to compare this with a copy received
through the ordinary channels. You do not need to be instructed in the
means proper for securing and identifying this. The experiment may seem
to you a simple one, but I assure you that it is so difficult that you
cannot hope to repeat it without preparation you would find pretty
severe."

He rose as he spoke, and drew his robe about him.

"I have to thank you," he continued, "for your patience and attention.
As I meet so many of you not infrequently, it is better to trust to your
courtesy not to name me than to your ignorance."

He pulled off, as he spoke, the black mask, and with cries of surprise
more than half the members of the Club called out the name of one of the
best-known club men of the town, a man who had traveled extensively in
the East, a man who had proved his powers by distinguished services
in literature, a man of wealth and of leisure, and one of dominating
character. Smiling calmly, he replaced the mask, and stood a moment in
silence.

"That is all," he said.

Then, with a peculiar gesture he waved his arms over the company, and
repeated a few words in some unknown tongue. He stepped down from the
platform and walked quietly from the room. But by that gesture or spell
he had strangely wrought upon their minds; from that moment no man of
them all, not even the President, has ever been able to remember who was
their acquaintance who that evening did such wonders in the sight of the
astonished Psychical Club.




TIM CALLIGAN'S GRAVE-MONEY


I

"'T was a fool's notion to get tipped out of a boat anywhere," said Tim
Calligan to his circle of fellow pensioners at the Dartbank poor-farm,
"me that's been on the water like a bubble from the day me mother weaned
me, saints rest her soul, and she as decent a woman as ever was born in
County Cork."

Tim was relating the oft-told tale of his escape from drowning, a story
of which they were fond, and which he delighted to tell. The old man had
a fertile Celtic fancy, and his narrations were luxuriant with exuberant
growth.

"So there was meself drownin' like a blind kitten in a pond,--and many
's the litter of 'em I'd sent to the cat's Purgatory by the way of that
very river, saving that the Purgatory of cats there ain't any, having
no souls, by the token that having nine lives they'd belike have nine
souls, and being so many they'd crowd good Christian souls in
Paradise,--blessings on the holy saints for previnting it.

"No more could I make me head stay out of water," Tim went on, "than if
it was a stone. 'Good-by, Tim, me boy,' sez I to meself. 'Ye're gone
this time,' sez I, 'and I'll miss nothing in not being at yer wake, by
the token that there won't be no wake; and ef there was,' sez I, still
to meself, 'there could be nothing to drink but water here in this
cursed stream.' And down I went again, like a dasher in a churn. 'Holy
St. Bridget,' thinks I, 'how far 'll it be to the bottom of this
ondecent river. Likely it goes clean through to Chiny,' thinks I, 'and
one of them bloody, onbelaving heathen 'll be grabbing me presently with
his mice-eating hands. But it's better being pulled out by a heretic
heathen than staying in and soaking.' With that up again I goes, like a
shellaly at a fair; and it was like fire flashing in me eyes. Sez I to
meself: 'That 'll be Widdy Malony's bit of a house,' sez I, spaking
always in me mind because of the floods of water in me mouth. 'It'll be
burning to the very ground,' sez I, 'and me missing all the fun of it.
The blessed saints help the poor woman, turned out of house and home to
get bite and sup for her children like a chipmunk, and every one of them
taking after Dennis, and I might have married her meself long ago if
they was fewer, for I'd want a ready-made family small,' sez I to
meself, plunking up and down in the water like a dumpling in the broth.
''T is pitiful to think of her house burning down over her head,' sez I,
'and she never to know the man might have made her Mis' Calligan's down
here drowning in plain sight of the very flames of it, and she nor
nobody doing one thing to save him, praise be to the handiworks of God.
Faith, and 't would be better for the both of us if she had more water
and meself more fire,' sez I in me mind. And all the time 't was no
fire, but just the blessed sun I'd never see again, barring I had n't
got saved, and it shining and flashing in the eyes of me from the
widdy's windows."

The tale was long, for it included an enumeration of all the sensations
and emotions which Tim had really experienced, and all those which, in
the course of long years, he had been able to imagine he might have
felt. As at the poor-farm time was not an object, however, except of
slaughter, the length of the narrative was its greatest recommendation.

"And with that," Tim at last ended his recital, "I felt the whole top of
me head pulled off as I lay soft and easy on the bottom of the flood,
and thinking nothing at all, but reflecting how soft the mud of it were
and pitying Pat Donovan that he'd never get the quarter I owed him.
'That 'll be a Chany-man or the Divil, Tim, me boy,' sez I to meself;
and then I made no more observes to meself at all, owing to the soul
having gone out of me body. And all the time it was Bill Trafton
catching me by the hair, him having dove for me just shortly after me
being dead, and dragging me to the top when I could n't be moved from
the bottom, and was likely to die any minute, saving that it was dead
already I was. And he saved me life, by the token that the soul had gone
out of me peaceful; but, Holy Mother, how'll I be telling ye the pain of
its coming back! 'T was like the unwilling dragging back of a pig out of
a praitie patch to get the soul of me back from the place it had gone
to, and they rubbing me to show it the care they'd take of me, and
coaxing it for two mortal hours."

As the tale ended, the bleared eyes of one of the auditors were
attracted to a light wagon which had turned into the lane at the foot of
the long <DW72> upon which the poor-house stood.

"Somebody 's comin'," old Simeon observed deliberately. "Likely it's the
new Over_seer_."

"Yes, that's him," Tim assented. "That's Dan Springer."

"I 'spected he was a-comin'," Grandsire Welsh commented, with a senile
chuckle. "Huldy and Sam's been a-slickin' up things."

"Huldy and Sam," in more official language Mr. and Mrs. Dooling, were
the not unworthy couple who had the poor-farm in charge.

"Wa'n't you sayin' t'other day," asked old Simeon, "thet you particular
wantid to see the Over_seer_?"

"It's pining for him I am the time," Tim answered.

The old men sat silent, watching the approach of the visitor, who drove
up to the hitching-post near them, and who leaped from his wagon with a
briskness almost startling to the aged chorus.

"Spry," old Simeon commented. "I've seen the time, though, when I was
spry too."

Springer fastened his horse, and came toward them.

"How d' do, boys?" he said cheerily. "How goes it?"

The contrast between his great hearty voice and the thin quavers in
which they answered him was pathetic. He lingered a moment, and
then turned to make his way into the house. Tim rose and hobbled
rheumatically after him.

"Whist, Mister Springer," he called; "would ye be after waiting a wee
bit till I have a word of speech with yer."

"Well, what can I do for you?" Springer asked good-naturedly. "Don't
they treat you well?"

The old man took him by the arm and drew him around the corner of the
house, away from the curious eyes of his companions.

"Whist!" he said, with a strange and sudden air of excitement. "Wait
till I'm after telling yer. Your honor'll mind I'm after _trusting_ yer;
_trusting_ yer, and ye'll no be betraying an old man. It's meself," he
added, with a touch of pride at once whimsical and pathetic, "is
ninety-three the day."

"Are you as old as that? Well, I'd keep your secret if you were twice as
old," Springer returned, with clumsy but kindly jocoseness.

Tim raised himself until he stood almost upright.

"It's the money," he whispered, "the money I've saved for me burying."

He turned to stretch his thin, bloodless finger toward the bleak cluster
of mounds on the hillside where mouldered the dead of the poor-farm.

"I'll no lie there," he said, with husky intensity. "I've scraped and
scraped, and saved and saved, and it's the wee bit money I've got to pay
for a spot of consecrated ground over to Tiverton. Ye'll no put me here
when I'm gone! I'll no rest here! Me folks was respectable in the Old
Isle, an' not unbeknowing the gentry; and there's never a one put
outside consecrated ground. Ye'll promise me I'll be put in the
graveyard over to Tiverton, and me got the money to pay."

Springer was as unemotional and unimaginative as a hearty, practical,
well-fed man could be, but seeing the tears in the old pauper's bleared
eyes, and hearing the passion of his tone, he could not but be moved.
He had heard something of this before. His predecessor in office had
mentioned Tim, and his twenty years' saving, but so few were the chances
a pauper in Dartbank had of picking up even a penny that the hoard even
of so long a time could not be large. Now and then some charitable
soul had given the old man a trifle. A vague sympathy was felt for the
pathetic longing to be assured of a grave in consecrated ground, even
among the villagers who regarded the idea itself as rank superstition.

"It's all right, Tim," the Overseer said. "If you go off while I have
the say, I'll see to it myself. If you'd be any more comfortable over in
Tiverton, we'll plant you there."

"Thank yer honor kindly," Tim answered. "The Calligans has always been
decent, God-fearing folks, and it's meself'd be loth to disgrace the
name a-crawling up out of this unholy graveyard forby on Judgment Day,
and all the world there to see, and I never could do it so sly but the
O'Tools and the O'Hooligans 'd spy on me, and they always so mad with
envy of the Calligans they'd be after tattling the news all over
Heaven, and bringing shame to me whole kith and kin."

The Overseer laughed, and responded that if Tim had laid by the money to
pay for the job, he would certainly see that the grave was made in the
consecrated earth of Tiverton churchyard. Then with a brisk step he
passed on to attend to the sordid affairs of his office within. The most
troublesome matter was left until the last.

"As to the Trafton child," he said to Huldy and Sam, "I don't see that
anything can be done. I've spoken to the Selectmen about it, and they
don't think the town should be called on to pay out twenty-five dollars
when here's a place for the child for nothing."

"That's just what I told Louizy," Huldy responded. "I said that's what
they'd say; but Louizy 's dretful cut up."

Springer moved uneasily or impatiently in his seat, so that the old
wooden chair creaked under the weight of his substantial person.

"I know she is," he said; "if I could afford it, I'd send the child to
her folks myself; but I can't, and I don't see but the girl's got to go
to 'Lizy Ann Betts. Perhaps she won't be so hard on her."

"Hard on her," sniffed Huldy; "she'll just kill her; that's all."

At the word a wretched-looking woman pushed into the kitchen as if she
had been listening at the door. She held out before her a right hand
withered and shriveled by fire.

"Oh, Mr. Springer," she broke out, tears running down her cheeks, "don't
send my Nellie to be bound to that woman! She's all I've got in the
world; and she never wanted till I was burned. Send her to my folks in
Connecticut and they'll treat her as their own."

She sank down suddenly as if her strength failed, and sat stiff and
despairing, with eyes of wild entreaty.

"It's hard, I know," Springer answered awkwardly, "but Nellie'll be
near you, and she would n't be in Connecticut. 'Lizy Ann Betts ain't
a bad-hearted woman. She'll do well by the child, I hope."

"She'll do well?" the mother cried shrilly, raising herself with sudden
vehemence. "Did she do well by the last girl was bound to her from this
farm? Did n't she kill her?"

"There, there, Louizy," interposed Huldy, "it ain't no sort of use to
make a fuss. What the S'lectmen say they say, and--"

She was interrupted by a cry without, and in an instant the door was
flung open by old Simeon, who with wildly waving arms and weirdly
working face cried out:--

"F' th' Lord's sake! Come quicker 'n scat! Old Tim's in a fit!"


II

The account old Simeon and Grandsire Welsh gave of Tim's seizure was
that he had been sitting outside the kitchen window, where they all were
listening with interest to the conversation within, when suddenly he had
thrown up his arms, crying out that he could not do it, and had fallen
in a fit. No one at the poor-farm could know that Tim had reached the
crisis of a severe mental struggle which had been going on for days. He
had for days listened to the bitter words of Mrs. Trafton, and had
sympathized with her grief over her child; and all the time he listened
he had been secretly conscious that the little hoard he had gathered for
his burying would save Nellie from the Betts woman, a shrew notorious
all over the county for her cruelty. He remembered that Bill Trafton had
saved him from drowning; that Mrs. Betts had the credit of having caused
the death of her last bound child; and against this he set the terror of
rising at the Resurrection from the unblessed precincts of the Dartbank
Potter's Field. The mental conflict had been too much for him, and the
appeal of Mrs. Trafton to the Overseer had broken old Tim down.

Tim was got to bed, and in time recovered his senses, although he was
very weak. Mrs. Trafton volunteered to watch with him that night, and so
it came about that at midnight she sat in the bare chamber where old Tim
lay. As the hours wore on Tim seemed much brighter, and asked her to
talk to him to while away the time. The only subject in her mind was her
child.

"If Nellie was with my folks," she said, "I'd try to stand being away
from her; but it's just killing me to have that Betts woman starve her
and beat her the way she's done with the others. She'd kill Nellie."

Tim moved uneasily in bed.

"But ye'd be after seein' the child here," he muttered feebly.

"I'd see her no more'n if she was with my folks," returned Louizy
bitterly; "but I'd know how she was suffering."

The sick man did not answer. He turned his face to the wall and lay
silent. After a time his regular breathing showed that he slept, while
the watcher brooded in hopeless grief. At length Tim grew restless and
began to mutter in his sleep.

"The poor creature's having a bad dream," Louizy said to herself, as his
words grew more vehement and wild. "I wonder if I'd better wake him."

She was still debating the matter in her mind when Tim gave a sudden cry
and sat up in bed, trembling in every limb. His face was ghastly.

"Oh, I will, I will!" he cried out. "I will, so help me Holy Mary!"

"Tim, Tim, what's the matter?" asked the nurse.

The old man clutched her hands desperately for a moment, and then seemed
to recover a little his reason. He sank down again and closed his eyes.
For a time he lay there silent. Then he said with strange solemnity:--

"'T is a vision meself has had this night, Louizy."

She thought his mind still wandering, but in a moment he went on with
more calmness: "I'll tell it to ye all, Louizy. Give me a sup till I get
strength. I'm no more strong than a blind kitten that's just born."

She gave him nourishment and stimulant, and Tim feebly and with many
pauses told his dream. The force of a natural dramatic narrator still
shaped his speech, and as he became excited, he spoke with more and more
strength, until he was sitting up in bed, and speaking with a voice more
clear than he had used for many a day.

"But it was a fearsome dream's had holt on me the night. 'T is meself's
been palarvering with the blessed St. Peter face to face and tongue to
tongue; and if I'd ought to be some used to it through having been dead
once already by drowning, this time I was broke up by being dead in good
earnest, by the same token that when St. Peter set his two piercing
black eyes on me, I could tell by the look of 'em that it was straight
through me whole body he was seeing.

"And the first thing I knew in my dream I was going all sole alone on
a frightsome road all sprinkled over with ashes and bones, and I that
crawly in my back I could feel the backbone of me wiggling up and down
like a caterpillar, so my heart was choking in my throat with the fear
of it. And I went on and I went on; and all the time it was in the head
of me there was that coming behind was more fearsome than all the bones
and skelingtons forninst. And I went on and I went on, seeming to
be pushed along like, and not able to help meself; and all the time
something was creeping, and creeping, and creeping behind, till all the
blood in my body was that chilled the teeth of me chattered. And I went
on and I went on till I could n't stand it one mortal minute more; but I
had to turn if the life went out of me for it. And there behind was a
mite of a girl, a wee bit thing, thin and starved looking, and seeming
that weak it was pitiful to see. 'Poor thing,' sez I to my own ghost,
'it's pitying her the day is Tim Calligan, if I be him,' sez I, 'and not
some other body, for having no body perhaps I ain't anybody at all, but
just a spook in this place that ain't nowhere.' And all the time I was
that scared of the wee bit child, being as it were where it could n't
be, and me dead before it and it dead behind me, and always following
and following; so without thinking deeply what was to be done, I starts
up and runs as hard as my legs that was turned into ghost shanks would
let me. And I run through them ashes, stumbling on bones and seeing
shadows that would get in the way and I had to run through 'em, and the
weight of the horror of it words would n't tell.

"And when I run, the wee bit child run; and it scared me worse than
ever when the further I run away from it the closer it was to me, till
at last it had a grab on the tail of my coat; and it clung on, and I
that mad with fear I had no more sense than a hen with its head cut
off and goes throwing itself round about for anger at the thought of
being killed, and not knowing it is dead already. And oh, Louizy, the
scaresomeness of the places I run through a-trying to get rid of that
wee bit thing! It's downright awful to think of the things that can
happen to a dead man while he's alive all the time and forgetful of it
through dreaming!

"So when I'd been going on till mortal man could n't stand it no longer,
let alone a ghost, there I was just forninst the gate of Heaven, not in
the least knowing how I come there or would I get in; and blessed St.
Peter himself on a white stone outside the gate sitting and smiling and
looking friendly so the terror went out of me like a shadow in the sun.
And I scraped my foot, and I went up close to him, standing that way
would I hide the child ahind of me; for sez I to meself: 'What'll I say
to his Reverence and he axes me about the girl?' And St. Peter he sez to
me, mighty polite and condescending: 'Good-morning,' sez he. 'The top of
the morning to your Reverence, and thank ye kindly,' sez I. 'And what'll
be your name?' sez he. 'Tim Calligan, your honor,' sez I, answering as
pert as ever I could; for there was that in his manner of speaking
that made me feel shivery, as if me heart'd been out all night in a
snowstorm. 'It's a decent, respectable body I am, your Reverence,' sez
I, 'though I say it as should n't, having nobody else at hand that would
put in a word for me.' 'And was ye buried in holy ground?' sez he. 'I
was that,' sez I; 'and many's the weary year I've been scraping to do
that,' sez I. 'And what'll that be behind ye?' sez he. And I looked
this way and that way, trying to make as if I did n't know; and at last
I pretended to spy the child, and to be that surprised he could n't
suspect I ever clapped eyes on the wee bit thing before. 'That, your
Reverence,' sez I, 'has the look of a scrap of a girl. Is it one your
Reverence is bringing up?' sez I, being that desperate I was as bold
as a brass kettle. 'And what'll she be doing here?' sez his Reverence,
paying no heed to the impertinence of the question. 'Sure, how'll I know
that?' sez I. 'Will she be coming with you?' sez he. 'Don't she belong
hereabouts?' sez I, trying hard to brazen it out, and feeling my heart
go plump down out of my mouth into my boots, more by token that I was
barefoot the time. 'Will she be coming with you?' sez he again. 'Sorra
a bit,' sez I; 'I just could n't get away from her,' sez I. 'And what
for'll you be trying to get away from her, and her no bigger than a
bee's knee?' sez he, looking at me so hard that I could n't hold up my
face forninst him. 'Well, your Reverence,' sez I, looking down at the
stones, and seeing the weeds trying to grow between them in the very
face of Heaven itself, 'it's inconvenient traveling with a child
anywhere, let alone the ondecent places I've been through this night;
and the girl was n't mine, and I might get blamed for keeping her out
late, with her folks getting scared about her, not knowing where she
was, and not understanding she was where your Holiness would be after
caring for her.' And with that St. Peter put out his hand, looking that
sharp his eyes went through me like needles; and he pulled the wee bit
child from behind me, and he sez to her: 'What is the name of yer?'
'Nellie,' sez she, her voice so thin you could n't hear it, only knowing
what she said from the moving of her lips like shadows on the wall.
'And how came you here?' sez he. 'I was beat and starved to death,'
sez she, shivering till 't was a mercy she did n't go to pieces like
a puff of smoke. And with that St. Peter looked at me once more, and
the cold sweat run down my backbone like rain down a conductor in a
thunder-storm. 'Your Reverence,' sez I, trembling, 'I did n't beat and
starve the girl.' 'That may be,' sez he, 'but there'll be some reason
why she's hanging on to your coat-tail like a burr on a dog,' sez he.
'What for are you following Tim Calligan,' sez he to the girl, 'and he
dead and resting in holy ground?' And with that she put you her little
front finger, that was as thin as a sparrow's claw that's starved to
death in winter, and she pointed to me, and sez she: 'He would n't give
the money to send me to my folks,' sez she; 'and my own father saved the
life of him when he was dead and drownded before I was born,' sez she.
'What for would n't you give the money, Tim?' sez St. Peter, sitting
there on that white stone like a judge trying the life of a man. 'Your
Reverence,' sez I, falling down on the stones at the feet of him,
'twenty years was I struggling, and saving, and scraping to get the bit
money for a grave in holy ground! If I'd give it to the child, I'd be
down this blessed minute I'm having the honor of conversing with your
Holiness--and it's proud I am of your condescending so far!--lying in
unconsecrated ground all cheek by jowl with heretics, and like as not
getting my bones mixed with theirs at the blessed resurrection. Sorra a
bit did I know the suffering of this poor wee bit thing.' 'And did her
father save your life?' sez he. 'He did that,' sez I, 'and a good,
decent, God-fearing man he were,' sez I, 'barring he were a heretic,
your Reverence, owing to his not being asked, it's likely, would he be
born a good Catholic,--and I hope your Reverence ain't been too hard on
Bill Trafton if he's come this way,' sez I. 'Tim,' sez St. Peter,
looking at me with a look like one of the long isuckles on the north
side of the barn in January,--'Tim, 't is no use trying the palarver on
me,' sez he. 'Ye know ye let this child get bound to that Betts woman,
and now she'll be bate to death, and who's to bear the blame if not ye
that might have stopped it? Do ye think, Tim Calligan,' sez he, raising
his voice so the blessed angels come a-looking over the holy walls of
Heaven to see what would be the matter,--by the same token that the
little gold hoops floating round their heads kept clashing together and
sounding like sleigh-bells, their heads was that close together on top
of the wall, and all their eyes looking at me that sorrowful like it
nigh broke my heart,--'do ye think,' sez he, 'you're sleeping in holy
ground when the price of the grave your worthless old carcass is in was
the life of this wee bit child?' And all the angels shook their heads,
and looked at me that reproachful the heart in me got so big it would
have killed me with its swelling only saving that I was dead already,
not to say being dead twice; and I fell to sobbing and praying to St.
Peter for mercy,--and the first thing I knew I woke up in bed, praise be
to the handiworks of God! made alive again, this being the third time,
counting the time I was first born."

Tim's tale was long, and it was interrupted by frequent intervals of
rest made necessary by his weakness. When he ended, the pale forecast
of dawn shone into the squalid room. Louizy was crying softly, in the
suppressed fashion of folk unaccustomed to give full vent even to grief.
Tim lay quiet for a long time. At last he aroused himself to feel
beneath the mattress, and to bring to light a dirty bag of denim. This
he pressed into the hand of his nurse.

"It'll take you both," he murmured feebly. "Blessings go with ye, and
the saints be good to the soul of Tim Calligan, coming up at the Day of
Judgment like a scared woodchuck out of unblessed ground!"


III

Tim failed rapidly. The excitement of his dream and the moral struggle
through which he had passed had worn upon his enfeebled powers. On the
second day after his seizure the priest came from Tiverton to administer
the last rites. When this was over, Tim lay quiet, hardly seeming
alive. Thus he was when Springer, who drove over late in the afternoon,
came in to see him.

"Tim," Springer said, "Mrs. Dooling has told me what you have done. The
ground you lie in will make little difference to a man that would do a
thing so white as that."

"Thank you kindly," Tim answered, in the shadow of a voice. "Father
O'Connor's promised to bless my grave. It's not the same as being at
Tiverton where the ground would be soaked with the blessing all round,
but leastways St. Peter 'll not be after flinging it in my face that the
blood of the child's on me."

The Overseer regarded him with such tenderness as did not often shine
within the doors of the poor-farm.

"Tim," he said, leaning forward as if he were half ashamed of his good
impulse, "don't worry any more. I'll pay for your grave at Tiverton, and
see that you are put in it."

The old pauper turned upon him a glance of positive rapture. He clasped
his thin, withered hands, trembling like rushes in the winds of autumn.

"Holy and Blessed Virgin," he prayed, almost with a sob, "be good to him
for giving a poor old dying creature the wish of his heart! Blessed St.
Peter--"

But the rush of joy was too great. With a face of ecstasy the old man
died.




MISS GAYLORD AND JENNY


When Alice Gaylord was, by the death of her grandmother, set free from
the long servitude of attending upon the invalid, it might have seemed
that nothing need hinder the fulfilling of her protracted engagement
to Dr. Carroll. The friends of both the young people expressed, in
decorous fashion, their satisfaction that old Mrs. Gaylord, ninety and
bed-ridden, should at last have been released, and it was entirely well
understood that what they meant was to signify their pleasure at the
ending of Alice's tedious waiting. Some doubt in regard to the girl's
health, however, still clouded the prospect. Long care and confinement
had told on her; and when a decent interval had passed after the death,
and the wedding did not take place, people began to say that it was such
a pity that Alice was not well enough to be married.

Dr. Carroll was thinking of her health as, one gloomy November
afternoon, he walked down West Cedar Street to the house where Gaylords
had dwelt from the time when West Cedar Street began its decorous
existence, and where Alice declared she had herself lived for
generations. He glanced up at the narrow strip of sky like dull flannel
overhead, around at the dwellings like a row of proper spinsters ranged
on either side of the way, and at the Gaylord house itself, a brick and
glass epitome of old Boston respectability. He reflected impatiently
that of course Alice could be no better until he got her out of an
atmosphere so depressing. Then he remembered that he had always liked
West Cedar Street, and he began to wonder whether he were not getting so
morbid over Alice that some other physician should be called in.

He had long been baffled by being unable to discover anything wrong,
beyond the fact that the girl was worn out with the strain of
ministering to an imperious and exacting invalid. She was nervously
exhausted; and he said to himself for the hundredth time that rest was
the only thing needed. A few months would set everything right. The
difficulty was that time had thus far not come up to what was expected
of it. Carroll was forced to acknowledge that, in spite of tonics and
rest, Alice was really not much better, and he had come almost to feel
that the real cause of her languor and weakness was involved in teasing
mystery.

The prim white door, with its fan-light overhead and the discreetly
veiled side-windows fantastically leaded, was opened by Abby, a sort of
housekeeper, who had the air of being coeval with the house, if not with
Boston itself. George always smiled inwardly at the look with which he
was received by this primeval damsel, a look of virginal primness at the
idea of allowing in the house a man who was professedly a suitor, and he
declared to Alice that he was still, after long experience, a little
afraid of Abby's regard. To-day her customary look vanished quickly, to
give place to one more vivid and spontaneous. Abby put up a lean
finger, mysteriously enjoining silence, and spoke instantly in a
sibilant whisper.

"Will you please come in here, sir, before you go upstairs?" she said.

She waved her thin hand toward the little reception-room, and the
doctor, in mild wonderment, obeyed the gesture and entered. Abby closed
the door softly, and came toward him with an air of concern.

"I must tell you, sir," the old servant said in a half voice, "a queer
thing's come."

"A queer thing's come," he repeated, leaning against the mantel. "Come
from where?"

"It's come, sir," repeated Abby, a certain relish of her mystery seeming
to his ear to impart an unctuous flavor to her tone. "It's just come.
Nobody knows where things come from, I guess."

"Oh, you mean something's happened?"

"Yes, sir; that's what I said."

"But what is it?"

"I don't know, sir; but it's queer."

He looked at her wrinkled old face, where now the mouth was drawn in as
if she had pulled up her lips with puckering-strings lest some secret
escape. He smiled at her important manner, and, leaning his elbow on
the mantel, prepared for the slow process of getting at what the woman
really meant. It proved in the event less laborious than usual, and he
reflected that the directness with which Abby gave her information was
sufficient indication of the seriousness with which she regarded it.

"Miss Alice ain't right, sir. She does what she don't know."

"What do you mean?" he demanded, really startled.

"She wrote a letter to you last night, and then instead of mailing it
she cut it all up into teenty tonty pieces, postage stamp and all; and
then said she did n't know who did it."

Carroll stared at the woman. Whimsies and mysteries were alike so
foreign to Alice that his first and natural thought was that Abby had
lost her mind.

"It's true, sir, every word," Abby insisted, answering his unspoken
incredulity. "She did just 's I say."

"If she said she did n't know who did it," the young man said sharply,
"she did n't know."

"Of course she did n't know. That 's what's queer."

"But she could n't have done it herself."

"Oh, but I saw her doing it, sir, and I wondered what was the matter
with the letter; only I did n't notice the postage stamp, or I'd have
spoken."

Carroll knew that Abby was as well aware as was he of Alice's invincible
truthfulness, and that he had not to reckon with any unfounded suspicion
of deceit. If Alice had said she did not know who destroyed the letter,
then it was evident that she had done it unconsciously and in some
condition which needed to be inquired into. He leaned back against the
mantel, and playing absently with the dangling prisms which hung above a
brazen pair of pastoral lovers on the old-fashioned candelabra, he heard
Abby's story in full. Miss Gaylord had said to the servant that she was
about to write the letter, and that it must be posted that evening.
Going to the parlor after the note, Abby had seen her mistress cut it
to pieces. The maid withdrew, supposing that for some reason the note
needed rewriting; but on returning some time later, she had been met
by the declaration that it was on the table. As it was not there, her
mistress had joined in searching for it, but nothing could be found save
the fragments in the waste-basket. Miss Gaylord had insisted that she
had not cut it, and that she was entirely ignorant of how the damage had
occurred.

Dr. Carroll was puzzled and troubled, nor was he less so when Alice had
given him her account. She did this unsolicited, and with evident
frankness.

"I suppose, George," she said, "it's absent-mindedness; but if I have
got so far that I don't know what I'm doing, I'd better be shut up for
a lunatic at once."

"Has anything of the sort ever happened before?" he asked.

"I am not sure," was her answer; "but sometimes I've found things done
that I could not remember doing: my clothes put in queer places, and
that sort of thing, you know. I never really thought much about it
before. You don't think--"

He could see that she was seriously troubled, and he set himself to
dissipate her concern.

"I think you are tired, and so you may be a little absent-minded; but I
certainly do not think it's worth making any fuss about. You and Abby
will have a theory of demoniacal possession soon, to account for a mere
slip of memory."

He did not leave her until it seemed to him that she no longer regarded
the incident seriously; but in his own mind he was by no means at
ease. At the earliest moment possible he went to consult with a fellow
physician who was a specialist in disorders of the nerves, and to him
he told the whole case as accurately as he was able. The specialist
put some questions and in the end asked:--

"Has she ever been hypnotized?"

"I'm sure she never has," Carroll answered. "She might easily be a
subject, I should think. She's naturally nervous, and just now she is
run down and unstrung."

"It seems like a case of self-hypnotism," the other said. "Sometimes,
you know, patients unconsciously hypnotize themselves, or get
hypnotized, without having any idea of it."

"But would n't she know it afterward?"

"Oh, no; the second personality generally knows all about the first--"

"You mean," interrupted Carroll, "that the normal person is the first
and the hypnotized is the second?"

"Yes. The personality that comes to the surface in hypnotism, the
subliminal self, knows all about the normal person, but the normal
person has no idea of the existence of the secondary, the subliminal
personality."

"It's so cheerful to think of yourself as a sort of nest of boxes,"
Carroll commented grimly, "one personality inside of the other, and you
only knowing about the outside box."

"Or you _being_ only the outside box, perhaps," the specialist
responded, with a smile. "Well, what we don't know would fill rather a
good-sized book."

The suggestion of hypnotism remained in Carroll's mind, and it was not
many days before he had a sufficiently plain but altogether disagreeable
confirmation of the specialist's theory. He was with Alice in the old
drawing-room, a place of quaint primness, with fine, staid Copley
portraits, and an air of self-respecting propriety utterly at variance
with psychical mysteries. He stood gazing out of the window, while Alice
moved about the room looking for a book of which they had been speaking,
and his eye was caught by a sparkling point of light on the sunlit wall
of the house opposite. He made some casual remark in regard to it, and
Alice came to look over his shoulder.

"What is it?" she asked.

"It must be a grain of sand in the mortar, I suppose," he answered. "It
is making a tremendous effect for such a little thing."

She did not answer for an instant. Then she burst into a laugh which to
him sounded strange and unpleasant, and clapped her hands.

"Well, I've come," she said joyously.

He wheeled quickly toward her. Her face seemed to have undergone a
change, slight yet extraordinary. She was laughing with a glee that was
not without a suspicion of malice, and she met his look with a boldness
so different from the usual regard of Alice as to seem almost brazen.
He could see that his evident bewilderment amused her greatly. A
mischievous twinkle lighted her glance.

"Oh, of course you think I'm she; but I'm not. I'm a good deal nicer.
She's a tiresome old thing, anyway. You'd like me a great deal better."

Carroll was entirely too confused to speak, but he was a physician, and
could not help reflecting instantly upon the cause of this strange
metamorphosis. He naturally thought of hypnotism, and he came in a
second thought to realize that Alice had with amazing rapidity been
sent into a hypnotic condition by looking for an instant at the
glittering point on the wall of the house across the street. What the
result might be, or what the words she spoke meant, he could not even
conjecture.

"Don't stare at me so," the girl went on. "I'm Jenny."

"Oh," he repeated confusedly, "you're Jenny?"

"Yes; I'm Jenny, and I'm worth six of that silly Alice you're engaged
to."

He took her lightly by the shoulders and looked at her, quite as much
for the sake of steadying his own nerves as from any expectation of
learning anything by examination. Her eyes shone with an unwonted
brightness, and seemed to him to gleam with an archness of which Alice
would not have been capable. The cheeks were flushed, not feverishly,
but healthily, and the girl had lost completely the appearance of
exhaustion which had troubled him so long. The head was carried with a
new erectness, and as he regarded her she tossed it saucily.

"You may look at me as much as you like," she said gayly. "I can stand
it. Don't you think I am better looking than she is?"

He was convinced that Alice could not know what she was saying, yet he
involuntarily cried out:--

"Don't, Alice! I don't like it!"

She pouted her lips, lips which to his excited fancy seemed to have
grown redder and fuller than he had ever seen them, and she made a droll
little grimace.

"I'm not Alice, I tell you. Kiss me."

In all their long engagement Alice had never asked him for a caress, and
the request hurt him now as something unwomanly. Instead of complying,
he dropped his hands and turned away. She laughed shrilly.

"Oh, you won't kiss me? I thought it was polite to do what a lady asked!
Well, if you won't now, you will some time. You'll want to when you know
me better."

She moved away, but he caught her by the arm.

"Stop!" he ordered her, with all the determination he could put into
the word. "Wake up, Alice! Be done with this fooling!"

The bright face grew anxious and the pouting lips beseeching.

"Don't send me away! I'll be good! Don't make her come back!"

"Alice," he repeated, clasping her arm firmly, "wake up!"

"You hurt me!" she cried half whiningly. "You hurt me! I'll go."

The wild brightness faded from the eyes, a change too subtle to be
defined seemed to come over the whole figure, the old tired expression
spread like mist over the face, and the familiar Alice stood there,
passing her hand over her eyes.

"What is the matter?" she asked, in a startled way. "Did I faint?"

He was conscious that his look must have alarmed her, and he made a
desperate effort to speak easily and naturally.

"I guess you came mighty near it," he answered, as naturally as he
could. "It's all right now."

For some days nothing unusual happened, so far as Carroll knew. He
watched Alice closely, and he plunged into all the literature on the
subject of hypnotism upon which he could lay hands. He was not sure that
at the end of a week's hard reading he was much clearer than at the
beginning, although he had at least accumulated a fine assortment of
terms in the nomenclature of animal magnetism. He cautiously questioned
Abby, and learned that for some time Alice had been subject to what the
old servant called "notional spells when she were n't herself." His
friend the specialist was greatly interested in all that Dr. Carroll
could tell him about the case.

"It is evidently a subliminal self coming to the surface," he
pronounced. "I've seen cases somewhat similar, but only one where the
patient was not hypnotized by somebody else."

"But what can I do about it?" George demanded. "I don't want any
subliminal selves floating about. I want the girl I know."

"Build up her general health," the other advised. "You say she's run
down and used up with taking care of her grandmother. Get her rested.
That's the only thing I can say. She is n't really ill, is she?"

"God knows what you call it," was Carroll's response. "She can't be
called well when she goes off the way she did the other day. I tell you
it was frightful, simply frightful!"

The days went on, and once more George had the uncanny experience of a
chat with Jenny. Alice had been looking over some of her grandmother's
belongings, and when he called, came down to him with a necklace of
rhinestones dangling and sliding through her fingers.

"See," she accosted him, in the buoyant manner he remembered only too
vividly, "is n't this gay? I should wear it, only I'm in her clothes,
and she won't wear anything but poky black."

Carroll tried to steady his nerves against the sudden shock.

"Of course you wear black, Alice," he said; "it is only six months since
your grandmother died."

She made him a merry, mocking grimace.

"Now don't pretend you don't know I'm Jenny," she retorted. "I saw you
knew me the minute you heard me speak. Alice! Pooh! She'd have come into
the room this way."

She darted to the door and turned back, to advance with her face pulled
down and her eyelids dropped.

"How do you do, dear?" she greeted him, with a burlesque of Alice's
manner so droll that he laughed in spite of himself.

Jenny herself burst into a shout of merriment and whirled about in a
pirouette, swinging the sparkling chain around her head.

"Is n't it fun?" she exclaimed, pausing before him with her head on one
side; "she can't even look at a bright thing half a minute but off she
goes, and here I am. Before I go this time, I'm going to stick up every
shiny thing I can find where she'll see it."

Carroll had a sickening sensation, as if the girl he loved had gone mad
before his very eyes; yet so completely did she appear like a stranger
that the feeling faded as soon as it arose. This was certainly no Alice
that he knew. He could not speak to her as his friend and betrothed,
although it was equally impossible to address her as a stranger. He was
too completely baffled and confused to be able to determine on any line
of action, and she stood smiling at him as if she were entirely
conscious of what was passing in his troubled brain.

"Did you know I cut up her letter?" Jenny demanded, with a smile
apparently called up by the remembrance.

"Yes," he answered, exactly as if the question had been put by a third
person.

"It was an awfully foolish letter," the girl went on. "I won't have her
writing like that to you. You've got to belong to me."

He had neither the time nor the coolness to realize his emotions, but he
accepted for the moment the assumption of the individuality of Jenny.

"You are nothing to me," he said. "I am engaged to Alice."

"Oh, that's all right. I know that. I know all about her; lots more than
you do. But I tell you, you'd a great deal better take me. I'm just as
much the girl you're engaged to as she is."

He looked at her darkly and with trouble in his eyes.

"Where is Alice?" he asked.

"Oh, she's all right. She's somewhere. Asleep, I think likely. I don't
want to talk about her. I never liked her."

"Talk about yourself, then. Where are you when Alice is here?"

"Oh, that's stupid. I'd rather talk about what we'll do when we are
married. Shall we go abroad right off?"

"It will be time enough to talk about that when there's any prospect of
our being married."

"You would n't kiss me the other day," Jenny said, looping the necklace
about his throat and bending forward so that her face was close to his.

A feeling of anger so strong that it was almost brutal came over him. He
tore the necklace out of her hands and threw it across the room. Then,
as on the previous occasion, he caught the girl by the wrists.

"Go away!" he commanded. "Let Alice come back!"

"Oh, you hurt me!" she cried. "I can't bear to be hurt! Let me go!"

He tightened his grasp.

"If you don't go, I'll really hurt. I won't have you fooling with Alice
like this."

Her glance wavered on his; then the eyelids drooped; and he loosened his
hold with the consciousness that Alice had come back.

"Why, George," she said, in her natural voice; "I did n't know you were
here."

He took her in his arms with a feeling as near to the hysterical as he
was capable of, and then instantly devoted himself to dissipating the
anxiety which his obvious agitation aroused in her.

As time went on, the appearances of Jenny became more frequent. The fact
that this secondary personality had once been in control of the body
which it shared with Alice seemed to make its reappearance more easy.
Alice evidently became more susceptible to whatever conditions produced
this strange possession. It was clear to Carroll that each time the
elfish Jenny succeeded in gaining possession of consciousness,--for so
he put it to himself, entirely realizing what a confusing paradox the
phrase implied,--she became stronger and better able to assert herself.
He grew more and more disturbed, but he was also more and more
completely baffled. Sometimes the matter presented itself to his
professional mind as a medical case of absorbing interest; sometimes it
appealed to him as a freak of gigantic irony on the part of fate; and
yet again he was swept away by love or by passionate pity and sorrow for
Alice. He felt that, all unconscious of her peril,--for she knew nothing
of her mysterious double,--she was being robbed of her very personality.

Most curious of all was his feeling toward Jenny, who had come in
his mind to represent an individual as tangible, as human, and as
self-existent as Alice herself. He never allowed himself to encourage
her presence, despite the fact that natural curiosity and professional
interest might well make him eager to study her peculiarities. He
insisted always upon her speedy departure from the body into which she
had intruded herself--or so he doggedly insisted with himself--like an
evil spirit. He had soon learned that her fear of physical pain was
excessive; that, like the child that she often seemed, she could be
managed best by dread of punishment; and he for a considerable time had
been able to frighten her away by threats of hurting her. As the days
went on, however, she began to laugh at his menaces, and he was obliged
to resort to trifling physical force. The strong grasp on the wrists
had sufficed at first, but it had to be increased as Jenny apparently
decided that he would not dare to carry out his threats, and one day he
found himself twisting the girl's arm backward in a determined effort
to drive off this persistent ghoul-like presence. The idea of injuring
Alice came over him so sickeningly that, had not his betrothed at that
instant recovered her normal state, he felt that he must have abandoned
the field. As it was, he was so unmanned that he could only plead a
suddenly remembered professional engagement and get out of the house
with the utmost possible speed.

There were other moods which were perhaps even worse. Now and again he
was conscious of a strong attraction toward this laughing girl who
defied him, looking at him with the eyes of Alice, but brimming them
with merriment; who tempted him with Alice's lips, yet ripened them with
warm blood and pouted them so bewitchingly; who walked toward him with
the form of his betrothed, but swayed that body with a grace and an
allurement of which Alice knew nothing. He felt in his nostrils a
quiver of desire, and shame and self-scorn came in its wake. Not only
did he feel that he had been false to Alice, but by a painful and
disconcerting paradox he felt that he was offering to her a degrading
insult in being moved by what at least was her body, as he might have
been moved by the sensual attractiveness of a light woman. Jenny was at
once so distinct, so far removed from Alice, and yet so identified with
her, that his emotions confounded themselves in baffling confusion. It
was not only that he could not think logically about the matter, but he
seemed also to have lost the directing influence of instinctive feeling.
Jenny represented nothing ethical, nothing spiritual, not even anything
moral. He was filled with disgust at himself for being moved by her, yet
humanly his masculine nature could not but respond to her spell; and
the impossibility of either separating this from his love for Alice or
reconciling it with the respect he had for her left him in a state of
mental confusion as painful as it seemed hopeless.

He became so troubled that it was inevitable Alice should notice his
uneasiness, and he was not in the least surprised when one evening she
said to him:--

"George, what is the matter? Are you worrying about me?"

He had prepared himself over and over to answer such a question, but
now he only hesitated and stumbled.

"Why--what makes you think anything is the matter?"

"I know there is; and I'm sure it's my fainting-spells."

She had come to speak of her seizures by this term, and George had
accepted it, secretly glad that she had no idea worse than that of loss
of consciousness.

"Why, of course I am troubled, so long as you are not well, but--"

"You don't like to tell me what is the matter," she went on calmly, but
with an earnestness which showed she had thought long on the matter. "I
dare say I should n't be any better for knowing, and I can trust you;
but I know you are worrying, and it troubles me."

His resolution was taken at once.

"See here, Alice," he said, "the truth is that you need to get away from
Boston and have an entire change of scene and climate. You used to be a
good sailor, and a sea voyage will set you up. I'm going to marry you
next week and take you to Italy."

"Why, George, you can't!"

"I shall."

"Even if I were well, I could n't be ready."

"Who cares? As to being well, you are going so you may get well. When I
order patients to go away for their health, I expect them to go."

She became serious, and looked at him with eyes of infinite sadness.

"Dear George," she said, "I can't marry you just to be a patient. You
must n't go through life encumbered by an invalid wife."

"I've no notion of doing anything of the kind," he responded brightly.
"It would be too poor an advertisement, and that's the reason I insist
on taking you abroad. What day do you choose, Wednesday, Thursday, or
Friday? We sail Saturday."

He would listen to no objections, but got Thursday fixed for the
wedding, and pushed forward rapidly his preparations for going abroad.
He enlisted the cooeperation of a cousin of Alice, an efficient lady
accustomed to carry everything before her, and, as Abby warmly approved
of his decision, he felt that Alice would be ready. He saw Alice but
briefly until Sunday evening, when he found her in a state of much
agitation.

"I am really out of my mind," she said. "What do you think I have done?"

"I don't care, if you have n't changed your mind about Thursday."

"I ought to change my mind. Oh, George, I've no right--"

"That is settled," he interrupted decisively. "What have you done that
is so dreadful?"

She produced a waist of dove- silk.

"Of course I could n't be married in black, you know, and this was to be
my dress. See here."

The front of the waist was cut and slashed from top to bottom.

"I must have done it some time to-day. Oh, George, it's dreadful!"

For the first time in all the long, hard trial of their protracted
engagement, she broke down and cried bitterly. He took her in his arms
and soothed her. He told her he knew all about it, and that she was
going to be entirely well; that he asked only that she would not worry,
but would trust to him that she would come safely and happily out of all
this trouble and mystery. She yielded to his persuasions, and, indeed,
it was evident that she had hardly strength to resist him even had she
not believed. She rested quietly on his shoulder and let him drift into
a description of the route he had laid out, and in her interest she
seemed to forget her trouble.

Before he left, she asked him what she could tell the dressmaker, who
would suspect if she was given no reason for being called upon to make a
new waist. He took the injured garment, went to the writing-table, and
splashed ink on the cut portions.

"You showed it to me," he said gayly, "and I was so incredibly clumsy
as to spill ink on it. Men are so stupid."

She laughed, and he went away feeling that he could gladly have
throttled Jenny, could he but succeed in getting her in some other
body than that belonging to his betrothed. If he was irritated by this
experience, however, he had one to meet later which tried him still
more. Abby, on letting him into the house on Tuesday, once more led him
mysteriously into the reception-room.

"Miss Alice's been writing to herself, sir."

She held toward him a sealed and stamped envelope addressed to Alice. He
took it half mechanically, and as he wondered how he was to circumvent
this new trick of the maliciously ingenious Jenny, he noted that the
handwriting was strangely different from Alice's usual style.

"Did she give you this to post?" he asked.

"It was with the other letters, and I noticed it and did n't mail it."

"I'll take it," he said. "You did perfectly right."

He wondered whether the prescience of Jenny would enable her to discover
that he had destroyed her note to Alice; then he smiled to realize how
he was coming to think of her as almost a supernatural demon, and
reflected that nothing could be easier than for her to leave a paper
where Alice must find it. A couple of days later he found his thought
verified when Alice said to him:--

"George, who is Jenny?"

As she spoke, she put into his hand an unsigned note which said only,
"George loves Jenny." The instant which was necessarily taken for its
examination gave him a chance to steady himself.

"You wrote it yourself," he said quietly. "Don't you recognize your
paper and your writing? It's a little strange, but sleep-writing always
is."

"Then I am a somnambulist!" she exclaimed, with flushing cheek.

"There is nothing dreadful in that," he replied. "You have promised to
trust me about your health. I know all about it, and if you write
yourself forty notes, you are not to bother."

She sighed, and then bravely smiled.

"I'll try not to worry," she told him; "but I am a coward not to send
you away. I wonder why I should have chosen Jenny as the name of your
beloved."

"I'm sure I don't know; it's an ugly name enough," he responded, with a
quick thought that he hoped Jenny could hear. "At any rate, I tell you
with my whole heart that you are the only woman in the world for me."

He did not see Jenny again until the evening before his marriage. He
fancied she was avoiding him, especially as once Alice sent down word
that she was too busy to see him. He received, however, a note on
Wednesday. The hand, so like that of Alice and yet so unmistakably
different, affected him most unpleasantly, nor was he made more at ease
by the contents.

"You think you got ahead of me by telling Alice she was a sleep-walker,
did n't you! Well, I don't care, for I'm going to get rid of her for
always when we are married. I did n't mean to be married in that nasty
old gray dress, and I won't be, either. You see if I am. You are very
unkind to me. You might remember that I'm a great deal fonder of you
than she is, because I've got real feeling and she's a kind of graven
image. You'll love your little wifie Jenny very dearly."

Dr. Carroll began to feel as if his own brain were whirling. He could
not reply to the note, since he could hardly address a letter to Jenny
somewhere inside the personality of Alice. He realized that a strain
such as this would soon so tell on him that he would be unfit to care
for Alice, and he made up his mind that the time had come for the
strongest measures. To tell what the strongest measures were, however,
was a problem which occupied him for the rest of the day, and about
which he consulted the specialist. Even when, that evening, he walked
down West Cedar Street, he could hardly be sure that he would carry out
his plan. He was told at the door by Abby that Miss Alice had given
strict orders against his being admitted.

"When did she do that?" he inquired.

"This forenoon, sir, when she gave me that note to send to you. She was
queer, sir. She had a cab and went down town shopping, and came back
with a big box. Then she had a nap, and to-night she's all right."

"I'll go up, Abby. It is necessary for me to see her."

As he came into the drawing-room Alice sprang up to meet him.

"I began to be afraid you would n't come," she said. "I've been queer
to-day, I know; and there's a dressmaker's box in my room I never saw,
and it's marked not to be opened till to-morrow. Oh, George, I am so
frightened and miserable! I know I ought to send you away, and not let
you marry me."

"Send me away, by all means, if it will make you feel any better. I
shan't go. Sit down in this chair; I want to show you something."

She took the seat he indicated. He trimmed the fire and left the poker
in the coals. Then from his pocket he took a ball of silvered glass as
large as an orange, and began to toss it in his hands. She stared at it
in silence for half a minute. Then the unmistakable laugh of Jenny rang
out.

"So you really wanted to see me, did you?" she cried. "I knew you would
some time."

"Yes," was his reply. "You may be sure I wanted to see you pretty badly
before I'd take the risk of doing something that may be bad for Alice."

"Oh, it's still Alice, is it?" Jenny responded, pouting. "I hoped you'd
got more sense by this time. Honest, now," she continued, leaning
forward persuasively, "don't you think you'd like me best? The trouble
is, you think you're tied to her, and you don't dare do what you want
to. I'd hate to be such a coward!"

He looked at the beautiful creature bending toward him, and he could not
but acknowledge in his heart that she was physically more attractive
than Alice, that she stirred in him a fever of the blood which he had
never known when with the other. All the attraction which had drawn him
to Alice was there, save for certain spiritual qualities, and added
was a new charm which he felt keenly. He could not define to himself
clearly, moreover, what right or ground he had for objecting to this
form of the personality of his betrothed, to this potential Alice, who
in certain ways moved him more than the Alice he had known so long. He
had only a dogged instinct to guide him, an unescapable inner conviction
that the normal consciousness of the girl had inalienable rights which
manhood and honor called upon him to defend. In part this was the
feeling natural to a physician, but more it was the Puritan loyalty to
an idea of justice. The more he felt himself stirred by the fascination
of Jenny, the more strongly his sense of right urged him to end, if
possible, this frightful possession forever. Both for himself and for
Alice, he was resolute now to go to any extreme.

"You are at liberty to put it any way you please," he responded to her
taunt, with grave courtesy. "I called you to tell you that I am going to
marry Alice to-morrow, and that I will not have her personality
interfered with any more."

"Oh, you won't? How are you going to help it?"

He looked at her eyes sparkling with mischievous defiance, at her red
lips pouted in saucy insolence, and he wavered. Then in the instant
revulsion from this weakness he turned to the fire and took from the
coals the glowing poker.

"That is how I mean to help it," he said.

She shrank and turned pale; but she did not yield.

"You can't fool me like that," she said. "You would n't really hurt the
body of that precious Alice of yours. You can't burn me without her
being burned too."

"She had better be burned than to be under the control of a little devil
like you."

For the moment they faced each other, and then her glance dropped. She
fell on her knees with a bitter cry, and held up to him her clasped
hands.

"Oh, why can't you let me stay!" she half sobbed. "Why won't you give me
a chance? You don't know how good I'll be! I'll do every single thing
you want me to. I know all your ways as well as she does, and I'll make
you happy. Why should n't I have as much right to live as she?"

The wail of her pleading almost unmanned him. He felt instinctively that
his only chance of carrying through his plan was to refuse to listen.
The thought surged into his mind that perhaps she had as much claim to
consciousness as Alice; he seemed to be murdering this strange creature
kneeling to him with streaming eyes and quivering mouth. He had to turn
away so as not to see her.

"I will not listen to you," he said doggedly. "I will not have you
trouble Alice. As sure as there's a God in heaven, if you come back
again when I am with her, I'll burn you with a hot iron; and I mean to
watch her all the time after we are married."

"If you married me, you'd have to help me against her," Jenny said,
apparently as much to herself as to him.

He made no other answer than to bring the heated iron so near to her
cheek that she must have felt its glow. She threw back her head with a
cry of fear. Then a look of defiance came over the face, and the red
lips took a mocking curve; but in the twinkle of an eye it was Alice who
knelt on the rug before him.

The strain of this interview, with the after-necessity of reassuring
Alice, left Carroll in a condition little conducive to sleep. All
night he revolved in his head the circumstances of this strange case,
comforting himself as well as he was able with the hope that at last he
had frightened Jenny away for good. He reflected on the Scriptural
stories of demoniacal possession, and wondered whether hypnotism might
not have played some part in them; he speculated on the future, and now
and then found himself wondering what would have come of his choosing
Jenny instead of Alice. A haggard bridegroom he looked when Abby opened
the door to him the next forenoon, and he grew yet paler when the old
servant said to him, with brief pathos,--

"She 's queer again."

Carroll set his teeth savagely. He hardly returned the greetings of the
few friends assembled in the drawing-room, but went at once to the
fireplace, applied a match to the fire laid there, and thrust the poker
between the bars of the grate. The clergyman came in, and in another
moment the rustle of the bride's gown was heard from the stairs outside.
Then, on the arm of a cousin of the Gaylords, appeared in the doorway a
figure in white. The sweat started on Carroll's forehead. He realized
that Jenny was making one more desperate effort to marry him. He
remembered her last words of the evening before, and saw that then she
must have had this in mind. He looked her straight in the eyes, and
then turned to the grate. As he stooped to grasp the poker the bride
stopped, trembled, put her hand to the door-jamb as if for support.
Then George, watching, put the iron down and advanced to Alice. What the
assembled company might think of his stirring the fire at that moment he
did not care. He felt that he had triumphed; and at least it was Alice
and not Jenny whom he married.

So far as Carroll can determine, Jenny never again intruded upon Alice's
personality. Renewed health, varied interests, and the ever watchful
affection of her husband gave Mrs. Carroll self-poise and fixed her in
a normal state. But there is a little daughter, and now and then the
father catches his breath, so startlingly into her face and into her
manner comes a likeness to Jenny.




DR. POLNITZSKI


"So you think," Dr. Polnitzski said, smiling rather satirically, "that
you are really tasting the bitterness of life?"

"I did n't say anything of the sort," I retorted impatiently. "I was n't
making anything so serious of it; but you'll own that to be thrown over
your horse's head on a stake that rips a gash six inches long in your
thigh is n't precisely amusing."

"Oh, quite the contrary," he answered. "I'm prepared to admit so much."

"In the very middle of the hunting season, too," I went on, "and at the
house of a friend. More than that, a man never gets over the feeling
that everybody secretly thinks an accident must be his own fault and he
a duffer. Even Lord Eldon, who's good nature itself and no end of a
jolly host, must think--"

"Nonsense," my physician interrupted brusquely, "Lord Eldon is not a
fool, and he realizes that this was n't your fault as well as you do
yourself. You take the whole thing so hard because you've evidently
never come in contact with the realities of life."

He was so magnificent a man as he stood there that the brusqueness of
his words was easily forgiven; he had been so unremitting in his care
ever since, in the illness of Lord Eldon's family physician, he had been
called in on the occasion of my accident, that I had become genuinely
attached to him. Our acquaintance had ripened into something almost like
intimacy, since my host and his family had been unexpectedly called from
home by the illness of a married daughter, and it had come to be the
usual thing for Dr. Polnitzski to pass with me the evenings of my slow
convalescence, which would otherwise have been so intolerably tedious.

"I dare say I've been too much babied most of my life," I returned; "but
a month of this sort of thing is pretty serious for anybody."

He smiled, then his face grew grave.

"I dare say you may think me tediously moral," he said, "but I can't
help thinking of what I see every day. For some years I've been trying
to do something for the poor people about here, and especially for the
operatives over at Friezeton. If you had any idea of the things I've
seen-- But, after all, you would n't understand if I were to tell you."

"I know," I returned, "that you have devoted yourself to the most
generous work among those poor wretches."

"I beg your pardon," responded he, stiffening at once, "but we will, if
you please, waive compliments."

"But," I persisted, "Lord Eldon and others have more than once expressed
their wonder that you, with talents and acquirements so unusual, should
bury yourself--"

"I was not speaking of myself," he interrupted, somewhat impatiently,
"but of my poor patients. If you knew what they suffer uncomplainingly,
it might make you a little more content."

We were both silent for a little time. I looked across the chamber at
the strong figure of the Russian, as he stood by the fire, and wondered
what his past had been. I knew that he was a mystery to all the
neighborhood where he had lived for the better part of a dozen years.
He was evidently a gentleman, and he seemed to be wealthy. I had
myself found him to be of unusual culture and refinement, and he had
unobtrusively won recognition as a physician of marked skill and
attainments. The wonder was why he should be living in England as an
exile, and why he so persistently resisted all efforts to draw him from
his retirement. He devoted himself to philanthropic work in a perfectly
quiet fashion, declining to be enrolled as part of any organized
charity. He was more and more, however, coming to be appreciated as a
skillful physician, and to be called in for consultation. He impressed
me on the whole as a man who had a past, and I could not but wonder
what that past had been.

"I dare say you are right," I answered, somewhat absently, "but has it
never occurred to you that it is easy to make the mistake of judging
the suffering of others by our own standards instead of by their real
feelings? It seems to be assumed nowadays that all men are born with
the same sensibilities, yet nothing could be farther from the truth."

Dr. Polnitzski did not reply for a moment. He seemed this evening to be
unusually restless. He walked about the room, getting up as soon as he
sat down, and made impulsive movements which apparently betrayed some
inward disturbance.

"Of course you are right," he said at length, in an absent manner. "The
classes not bred to sensitiveness cannot have the real sensibility--"

He broke off abruptly and came across to my couch.

"We were talking," he began, with a sudden, bitter vehemence which
startled me, "of real suffering. See! I have lived here silent in an
alien land for long years; but to-day--to-day is an anniversary, and I
have somehow lost the power to be silent any longer. If you care to
listen, I will tell you what I mean by suffering; I will tell you what
life has been to me."

"If you will," I responded, "I will try to understand."

He seemed hardly to hear or to heed my words, but, walking up and down
the chamber, he began at once, speaking with the outbursting eagerness
of a man who has restrained himself long.

"My father," he said, "was one of the small nobles in the neighborhood
of Moscow. I was his only son, and when he died, in my seventeenth year,
I had been his companion so much that I was as mature as most lads half
a dozen years older. My mother was a gentle, good woman. I loved my
mother, but she made little difference in my life. She was kind to me
and she prayed for me a good deal. She thought her prayers answered when
I grew up without debauchery. She may have been right; but I have lived
to think that there are worse things than debauchery."

He paused a moment, and then went on, looking downward.

"Once the little mother was frightened," he went on again, with a
strange mingling of bitterness and tenderness in his tone. "There was
a girl, the daughter of the steward; her name was Alexandrina."

His voice as he pronounced the stately name was full of feeling. He
seemed to have forgotten me, and to be telling his story to an unseen
hearer.

"Shurochka!" he said, dwelling on the diminutive with a fond, lingering
cadence most pathetic to hear. "Shurochka! I loved her; I was mad for
her; my blood was full of longing by day and of fire by night. It was
the complete, mad passion of a boy grown into a man, and pure in spite
of an ardent temperament. I used to stand under her window at night, and
if it were stinging with cold or storm I was glad. I seemed to be doing
something for her; you know the madness, perhaps, in spite of the cold
temperament of your race. I did not for a moment really hope for her.
Her family had betrothed her to her cousin, and it would have broken my
mother's heart for me to marry the descendant of serfs. I could n't even
show her that I loved her. My father out of his grave said to me what he
had said again and again while he was alive: 'Do not hurt those under
you; and especially do not soil the purity of a maiden.' I did not try
to conceal from the little mother that I loved Shurochka, and maybe the
servants gossiped, as they always do; but Shurochka herself I avoided. I
was not sure that I could trust myself to see her. It was a happiness to
the little mother when the girl was married and taken away to the home
of her cousin in Moscow. She felt safe for me then, and she was very
tender. Time, she said, would take this madness out of my heart."

He looked into the glowing fire with a strange expression and mused a
little.

"My good mother!" he said again. "She was too near a saint to
understand. That has been a madness time could n't take out of my heart!
I've gone out here on the moors and flung myself down on the ground and
bitten the turf in agony because it seemed to me that I had borne this
as long as human endurance was possible! No; if the spirit of the little
mother sees me, she knows that time has not taken the madness out of
me!"

His face had grown white with feeling, and he seemed to struggle to
control himself.

"I can't tell you whether it was wholly from the loss of her and the
death of my mother which came soon after, or whether it was the current
of the time, the unrest in the air, that drew me toward the men who were
striving to free Russia from political slavery. I went to St. Petersburg
to continue my studies, and there I was thrown with men aflame with the
ardor of patriotism. Constantly the cause of Holy Russia secretly took
more and more absolute possession of me. I confided it to nobody. I did
not even suspect that anybody had the smallest hint of my state of
mind, and yet, when the time came, when I had made my decision to throw
in my lot with the patriots, I found them not only ready, but expecting
me. They had felt my secret comradeship by that sixth sense which we
develop in Russia in our zeal for country, and the imperative need of
such an intelligence in the work we have to do.

"I did n't take the step from simple patriotism, perhaps. Motives are
generally mixed in this world. There was a last touch, a final reason in
my case, as in others, that had a good deal of the personal. I was ripe
for the cause, but there was a gust to shake the fruit down. There came
bitter news from Moscow."

Again he paused, but only for a second; then threw back his head and
went on with a new hardness in his tone more moving than open
fierceness.

"Shurochka was gone. It was whispered that a noble high in the army had
carried her off, but no one dared to speak openly. We must be careful
how we complain in Holy Russia! When her husband tried to find her, when
he tormented the police to right him, he was arrested as a political
offender--the charge always serves. The man, as I afterward learned
authoritatively, was no more a conspirator than you are. He was sent
to the mines of Siberia simply because he complained that his wife had
been stolen, and so made himself obnoxious to a man in power. It was
fortunate for me that I did not learn the officer's name, or I should
have gone to Siberia too."

Dr. Polnitzski threw himself into a chair by the fire and remained
staring into the coals as if he had forgotten me, and as if he again
were back in the dreadful days of which he had spoken. I waited some
time before I spoke, and then, without daring to offer sympathy, I asked
if he were willing to go on with his story. He looked at me as if he saw
me through a dream; then he came to sit down beside my couch.

"Pardon me," he said. "I was a fool to allow myself to speak, but now
you may have the whole of it. It is n't worth while for me to tell you
my experiences as a patriot--a Nihilist, you would say. I was full of
zeal; I was young and hot-headed; I thought that all the strength of my
feeling was turned to my country. I know now that a good deal of it was
consumed in the desire for revenge upon that unknown officer. Russia,
our Holy Russia, I said to myself, must be to me both wife and child.
Stepniak said to me once that Russia was the only country in the world
where it was a man's duty not to obey the laws. You cannot understand
it here in England, where it never occurs to you to fear, as you lie
down at night, that for no fault whatever you may in the morning find
yourself on the way to lifelong exile and some horrible, living death.
I could tell you things that I can hardly think of without going mad;
they are the events of every day in our unhappy land. The heroism, the
devotion, of those striving to free Russia can be believed only by the
few that know they are true. They are beyond human; they are divine.
Why, the things I have known done by women so pure and delicate that
they were almost angels already--"

He broke off and wiped his forehead.

"I beg your pardon," said he, in a tone he evidently tried to make more
natural. "I will not talk of this. I have not spoken so for years and I
cannot command myself. It is enough for you to know that I saw it all,
and that, to the best of my ability, I did my part. As time went on,
I established myself as a physician at St. Petersburg. My family
connection, although I had no near relatives, was of use to me, and in
the end I had an excellent position. I was fortunate in the curing of
wounds, and I had the luck to attract attention by saving the life of a
near relative of the Czar. All this I looked at as so much work done for
the cause. Every advance I made in influence, in wealth, in power, put
me in a position to be so much the more serviceable to the great purpose
of my life. Personal ambition was so swallowed up in the tremendousness
of that issue that self was lost sight of. The patriot cannot remember
himself in a land like Russia.

"When the execution"-- He paused and turned to me with a singular smile.
"You would say the assassination--when the death of General Kakonzoff
was determined in our Section, no part was assigned to me, but I was
high enough in the counsels of the patriots to know all that was done.
He had possession of information which it was necessary to suppress.
He came to St. Petersburg to present it in person. He told me frankly
enough afterward that he could not trust any one because he counted upon
a reward for giving the evidence himself. We were minutely informed of
his plans and his movements. We had taken the precaution to replace his
body-servant by one of our own men as soon as he began to make inquiries
about two patriots who were suspected by the government. He had proofs
which would have been fatal to them, and it was necessary to intercept
these. If he had been put out of the way, our agent would easily have
got possession of the papers, and without the testimony of the general
our two friends were safe. The plot failed through one of those chances
that make men believe in the supernatural. He was shot as he stepped out
of the train at the St. Petersburg station, but the very instant our man
fired, Kakonzoff stumbled. The bullet, which should have gone through
his heart, passed through his lungs without killing him."

The perfectly cool manner in which Dr. Polnitzski spoke of this incident
affected me like a vertigo. To have a man who is one's daily companion,
and of whom one has become fond, speak of an assassination as if it were
an ordinary occurrence, is almost like seeing him concerned himself in
a murder. I lay there listening to the doctor with a fascination not
unmixed with horror, despite the fact that my sympathies, as he knew
beforehand, were strongly with the Nihilists. To be in sympathy with
their cause and to come so near as to smell the reek of blood, so to
speak, were, however, very different things.

"By a strange chance," the doctor went on, "I was summoned to attend the
wounded man, and although it was a desperate fight, I was after some
days satisfied that I could save his life."

"But," I interrupted, "I don't see why you should try to save his life
if you were of those who doomed him to death in the first place."

He looked at me piercingly.

"You forget," he answered, "that I was called to him as a physician.
It is the duty of a physician to save life, as it may be the duty of a
patriot to take it. I was trying to do my best in both capacities. I had
given the best counsel I could in the Section and, when he was on his
feet, I would have shot him myself if it had seemed to my superiors that
I was the best person to do it. Does it seem to you that I could have
taken advantage of his helplessness, of his confidence, of my skill as
a physician, to deprive him of the life which it is the aim of a
physician's existence to preserve?"

He waited for me to reply, but I had no answer to give him. The
situation was one so far outside of my experience, so fantastically
unreal as measured by my own life, that I could not even judge of it.

"See," he went on, leaning forward with shining eyes and with increasing
excitement of manner, "the patient puts himself into the hands of his
physician, body and soul. To betray that trust is to strike at the very
heart of the whole sacred art of healing. If I, as a physician, took
advantage of this sick man, I not only betrayed the personal trust he
put in me, but I was false to the whole principle on which the relation
of doctor and patient rests. Don't you see what a tremendous question is
involved? That to harm Kakonzoff was to go beyond the limits of human
possibility?"

"Yes," was my answer; "I can understand how a doctor might feel that;
but I don't know how far the feeling of a patriot might overbalance
this; how far the idea of serving his country would overcome every
other feeling."

Polnitzski gave me a glance which made me quiver.

"It is a question which I found I did not readily answer," he said,
"when I received from the chief of our Section an order not to let
Kakonzoff recover."

He sprang up from his chair and began to pace the floor.

"What could I do?" he said, pouring out his words with a rapidity which
increased his slight foreign accent so that when his face was turned
away I could hardly follow them. "There was my country bleeding her very
heart's blood. Every day the most infamous cruelties were done before my
eyes. And if this man Kakonzoff lived to tell his story, it meant the
torture, the death, of men whose only crime was that they had given
up everything that makes life tolerable to save their fellows from
political slavery. It lay in my power to let Kakonzoff die. A very
slight neglect would accomplish that. To the cause of my country I had
sworn the most solemn oaths, and sworn them with my whole heart. I had
never before even questioned any order from the Section. I had obeyed
with the blind fidelity of a man that loved the cause too well to think
of his own will at all. But now--now, I simply found what I was asked to
do was impossible! I could not do it. I fought it out with myself day
and night, and all the time the patient was slowly getting better. The
gain was slow, but it was steady, and I could not fail to see that his
giving his wicked testimony against the patriots was simply a matter of
time.

"But one day, through no fault of mine--indeed, because my express
orders had been disobeyed--he became worse. I can't tell you the relief
I felt in thinking the man might die and I be spared the awful necessity
of deciding. If he would only die without fault of mine--but I still did
my best. I gave minute directions, and when I left him I promised to
return in a few hours. As I went through the antechamber on my way out
of the hotel, some one came behind me quickly and laid a hand on my arm.
I thought it was the nurse, following to ask some question. I turned
round to be face to face with Shurochka! My God! It was like a crazy
farce or a bad dream!"

It is impossible that Dr. Polnitzski should not have known what an
effect his story was producing on me, and it is hardly doubtful that
his responsive Slav nature was more or less moved by my excitement. He
seemed, however, scarcely to be conscious of me at all. His face was
white with suffering, and he spoke with the vehemence of one who tries
to be rid of intolerable pain by pouring it out in words.

"In a flash," he went on, "it came over me what her presence meant, and
I said to myself, 'I will kill him!' I had always hoped that in striking
against the creatures of the Czar's tyranny I might unknowingly reach
the man that had harmed her; but I had wished not to know, for I could
not bear that personal feeling should come into the work I did for my
country. That work was the one sacred thing. Now what I had feared had
been thrust on me. Shurochka was changed; there were marks of suffering
in her face, and she showed, too, the effects of training which could
never have come honestly into the life of a woman of her station. She
was dressed like a lady. At first she did not know me. She spoke to me
as a stranger, and implored me to save Kakonzoff. She caught me by the
arm in her excitement; and then she recognized me. Then--oh, my God,
what creatures women are!--then she cried out that I had loved her once,
and that in memory of that time I must help her. Think of it! She flung
my broken heart in my face to induce me to save the scoundrel she loved!

"It was Alexandrina, my old-time Shurochka, clinging to me as if she had
risen from the grave where her shame should have been hidden, and I
loved her then and always. I could hardly control myself to speak to
her. All I could do was stupidly to ask if he was kind to her, and she
shrank as if I had lashed her with the knout. She cried out that it was
no matter, so long as she loved him, and that I must save him: that
she could not live without him. I--could n't endure it! I shook off her
hands and rushed away more wild than sane, with her voice in my ears all
agony and despair."

His face was dreadful in its pain, and I felt that I had no right to
see it. I closed my eyes, and tried to turn away a little, but in my
clumsiness I knocked from the couch a book. The crash of its fall
aroused him. He mechanically picked up the volume, and the act seemed
somewhat to restore him to himself.

"You may judge," he began again, "the hell that I was in. I could have
torn the man to bits, and yet--and yet now I said to myself that to obey
the Section and let Kakonzoff die would be doing a murder to gratify
personal hate. Yet all the sides of the question tortured me. I asked
the valet in the afternoon about the woman that had spoken to me. He
shrugged his shoulders, and said she was only a peasant that the general
was tired of, but that she would not leave him, although he beat her. He
beat her!"

There were tears in my eyes at the intensity with which he spoke, but
Dr. Polnitzski's were dry. He clenched his strong hands as if he were
crushing something. Then he shook himself as if he were awaking, and
threw back his head with a bitter attempt at a laugh.

"Bah!" he exclaimed, with a shrug. "I have never talked like this in my
life, but it is so many years since I talked at all that I have lost
control of myself. I beg your pardon."

He crossed the room, sat down by the fire, and began to fill his pipe.

"But, Dr. Polnitzski," I protested eagerly, "I do not want to force your
confidence, but you cannot stop such a story there."

He looked at me a moment as if he would not go on. Then his face
darkened.

"What could the end of such a story be?" he demanded. "Any end must be
ruin and agony. Should I be moved by personal feelings to be false to
everything I held sacred? Should I take my revenge at the price of
professional honor? I said to myself that in time she might come to care
for me, if this man were out of her life. Kindness could do so much with
some women. But could I make such a choice?"

"No," I said slowly, "you could not do that."

"Could I restore him to life, then, and have him go on beating that poor
girl and flinging her into the ditch at last?"

I had no answer.

"Could I let him live to destroy the patriots whose sworn fellow I was?
Do you think I could ever sleep again without dreaming of their fate?
Could I kill him there in his bed--I, the physician he trusted? Could I
do that?"

"In God's name," I cried, "what did you do?"

He regarded me with a look that challenged my very deepest thought.

"The patriots were spared," he answered. "That was my fee for saving the
life of General Kakonzoff. A year later I paid for having asked that
favor by being exiled myself."

"And--and--the other?" I asked.

"She, thank God, is dead."

For a moment or two we remained motionless and unspeaking. Then I
silently held out my hand to him. I had no words.




IN THE VIRGINIA ROOM


"Childless," was the word which she murmured in her heart, as she
entered the building which had once been the Presidential Mansion of
Jefferson Davis and now is the Confederate Museum. Why the thought of
her estranged daughter flashed upon her as she came to do honor to the
memory of her long dead husband, Mrs. Desborough could not have told,
but so overwhelming was the sadness of her mood that she could hardly
wonder if this bitter memory took advantage of her moment of weakness to
obtrude itself. She set her lips tightly and put it determinedly into
the background. She would not think of the daughter who was lost to her;
to-day and here no thought but should go back in loving homage and
passionate grief to the hero whose name she bore.

She went at once to the Virginia Room, bowing quickly but kindly to the
custodian of the Museum, and as she pushed open the door of the sad
place, she thought herself alone. The heavy April rain which was
drenching Richmond outside kept visitors away, and the building was
almost deserted. In her yearly visits to this spot, those pilgrimages
which she had made as to a shrine, she had once before had the Virginia
Room to herself, untroubled by the presence of strangers; and now with
a quick sigh of relief she realized how great had been the comfort of
that solitude. To her sensitive nature it was hard to stand before
the memorials of her dead and yet to be aware that strange eyes, eyes
curious if sympathetic, might be reading in her face all the emotions
of her very soul. To preserve the calm necessary before the public had
always seemed to her almost like being untrue to the memory she came to
consecrate; and to-day it was with a swelling sigh of relief that she
threw back her heavy widow's veil with the free, proud motion which
belonged to the women of her race and time--the women bred in the South
before the war. She was an old woman, though not much over sixty, for
pain can age more swiftly than time. The high-bred mien would be hers
as long as life remained, and wonderful was her self-control. Again and
again she had felt unshed tears burn in her eyes like living fire, yet
had been sure that no stranger had had reason to look upon her as more
than a casual visitor to the museum; but to be able to let her grief
have way seemed almost a joy. She felt the quick drops start at the bare
thought. Life had left her no greater blessing than this liberty to weep
undiscovered over the memorials of her dead.

At the instant a man came from behind one of the cases, so near that she
might have touched him. Instinctively she tried to take her handkerchief
from her chatelaine, and in her confusion detached the bag. It fell at
the feet of the gentleman, who stooped at once to pick it up. As he held
it out, she forced a smile to her fine old face.

"Thank you," she said; "I--I was very awkward."

"Not at all," he responded. "Those bags are so easily unhooked."

The tone struck her almost like a blow. To the disappointment of finding
that she was not alone in this solemn place was added the bitter fact
that the intruder who had come upon her was not of her people. An
impulse of bitterness from the old times of blood and of fire swept over
her like a wave. The room had carried her back as it always did to the
past, and after almost two-score years she for the first time broke
through the stern resolve that had kept her from hostile speech.

"You are a Northerner!" she exclaimed.

The words were nothing, but the tone, she knew, was hot with all the
long pent-up bitterness. She felt her cheek flush as, almost before
the words were spoken, she realized what she had said. The stranger,
however, showed no sign of resentment. He smiled, then grew grave again.

"Yes. Do not Northerners visit the Museum? I supposed nobody came to
Richmond without coming here."

She was painfully annoyed, and felt her thin cheeks glow as hotly as
if she were still a girl. To be lacking in politeness was sufficiently
humiliating, but to seem rude to one from the North, to fail in living
up to her traditions, was intolerable.

"I beg your pardon," she forced herself to say. "To come through that
door is to step into the past, and I spoke as I might have when--"

"When a Yankee in the house of President Davis would have required
explicit explanation," the stranger finished the sentence she knew not
how to complete.

Even in her discomposure she appreciated both the courtesy which spared
her the embarrassment of being left in the confusion of an unfinished
remark and the adroitness which gave to his reply just the right tone of
lightness. He was evidently a man of the world. Her instinct, not to be
outdone in politeness, least of all by one of her race, made her speak
again.

"I was rude," she said stiffly. "To-day is an anniversary on which I
always come here, and I forgot myself."

"Then I must have seemed doubly obtrusive," he returned gravely.

He was certainly a gentleman. He was well groomed, moreover, with the
appearance of quiet wealth. One of his hands was ungloved, and she noted
appreciatively how finely shaped it was, how white and well kept. The
North had all the wealth now, she reflected involuntarily, while so many
of the descendants of old Southern families were forced to earn their
very bread by occupations unworthy of them. They could not keep their
fine hands, hands that told of blood and breeding for generations,
as could this stranger before her. His attractiveness, his air of
prosperity, were offensive to her because they emphasized the pitiful
poverty of so many of her kin whose forefathers had never known what
want could be.

"The Museum is open to the public," she replied, with increasing
coldness.

She expected him to bow and leave her. Not only did he linger, but she
seemed to see in his face a look of pity. Before she could resent this
pity, however, she met his eyes with her own, and the look seemed to her
to be one of sympathy.

"Will you pardon my saying that I too came here to-day because it is an
anniversary?"

"An anniversary?" she echoed. "How can an anniversary bring a Northerner
here?"

"It is n't mine exactly. It is my son's. His mother is a Virginian."

So highly strung was her mood that she noticed almost with approval that
he had said "is" and not "was." He had at least not deprived his wife of
her birthright as a daughter of the sacred soil. She began to be aware
of a growing excitement. She could hardly have heard unmoved any
allusion to a marriage which had taken from the South a woman born to
its traditions and to its sorrows. She felt a fresh impulse of anger
against this prosperous son of the North who had carried away from a
Virginia mother a daughter as she had been robbed of hers. The cruel
pang of crushed motherhood which ached within her at the remembrance
of her own child, the child she had herself cast off because of her
marriage, was so fierce that for a moment she could not command her
voice. She could not shape the question which was in her heart, but she
felt that with her eyes she all but commanded the stranger to tell her
more.

"We live in the North," he explained, "but she has long promised the
boy that when he was eight he should see the relics of his Virginian
grandfather which are in the museum here. Unfortunately, when the time
came, she was not well enough to come with him; and as she wished him to
be here on this especial day, I have brought him."

The Southern woman felt her heart beating tumultuously, and it was
almost as if another spoke when she said in a manner entirely
conventional:--

"I trust that her illness is not serious."

"If it were, I should not be here myself," he answered.

She collected her strength, which seemed to be leaving her, and forced
herself to look around the room. She could not have told what she
expected, or whether she most hoped or feared what she might see.

"But your son?" she asked.

The man's face changed subtly.

"My father," he replied, "was an officer in the Union army. I wished to
see this place first, to be prepared for Desborough's questions. It is
n't easy to answer the questions of a clever lad whose two grandfathers
have been killed in the same battle, fighting on opposite sides."

The name struck her like a blow. She leaned for support against the
corner of the nearest case, and fixed her gaze on the pathetic coat of
General Lee behind the glass which showed her as a faint wraith the
reflection of her own face. Desborough had been her husband's name, and
this the anniversary of his death; she felt as if the dead had arisen to
confront her, and that some imperative call in the blood insistently
responded. Yet she could not believe that her son-in-law was before
her, regarding her with that straightforward, appealingly honest gaze;
she said to herself that the name was merely a coincidence, that every
day in the year was the anniversary of the death of some Virginian hero,
and that this could not be her daughter's husband.

"Have you decided what to tell your son?" she heard her voice, strange
and far off, asking amid the thrilling quiet of the room.

The stranger regarded her as if struck by the note of challenge in her
tone. His serious eyes seemed to her to be endeavoring to probe her own
in search of the cause of her sharpness.

"I can do no more," was his answer, "than to tell him what I have always
told him--the truth, as far as I can see it."

"And the truth which you can tell him here--here, before the sacred
relics of our dead, the sacred memorials of our Lost Cause--"

She could not go on, but stopped suddenly that he might not hear her
voice break.

"He has never been taught anything but that the men of the South fought
for what they believed, and that no man can do a nobler thing than to
give his life for his faith."

She became suddenly and illogically sure that she was talking to her
son-in-law, although the ground of her conviction was no other than the
one she had just before rejected. The whole thing flashed upon her mind
as perfectly simple. Her daughter knew that on this day she was always
to be found here, and had meant to meet her, with the little son bearing
his grandfather's name. The question now was whether the husband knew.
Something in his air, something half-propitiatory, something certainly
beyond the ordinary deference offered to a lady who is a stranger,
gave her a vague distrust. She was not untouched by the desire for
reconciliation, but she had again and again resisted that before,
and least of all could she tolerate the idea of being tricked. The
possibility that her son-in-law might be feigning ignorance to work the
more surely upon her sympathy angered her.

"Do you know who I am?" she demanded abruptly.

"I beg your pardon," he answered, evidently surprised, "but I have never
been in Richmond before. If you are well known here, or are the wife of
some man famous in the South, I am too completely a stranger to
recognize you."

"Yet you seemed to wish to explain yourself to me. Why?"

"I don't know," he began hesitatingly, searching her face with his
straightforward gray eyes. Then he flushed slightly, and broke out
with new feeling: "Yes; I do know. You came just as I was going away
because I could not endure the sadness of it; when every one of these
cases seemed to me to drip with blood and tears. That sounds to you
extravagant, but the whole thing came over me so tremendously that I
could n't bear it."

"I do not understand," she returned tremulously. "You have such
collections at the North, I suppose."

"But here it came over me that to all the sorrow of loss was added the
bitterness of defeat. I felt that no Southerner could come here without
feeling that all the agony this commemorates had been in vain; and the
pity of it took me by the throat so that when I spoke to you, you were a
sort of impersonation of the South--of the Southern women; and I wanted
to ask for pardon."

She drew a deep breath and raised her head proudly.

"Not for the war," he said quickly, with a gesture which seemed to wave
aside her pride and showed her how well he had understood her triumph at
the admission seemingly implied in his words. "I am a Northern man, and
I believe with my whole soul that the North was right. I believe in the
cause for which my father died. Only I see now that if he had lived in
the South, the same spirit would have carried him into the Confederate
army."

"But for what should you ask pardon, if the North was in the right?"

"For myself; for not understanding--for being so dull all these years
that I have lived with a wife faithful in her heart to the South and too
loyal to me to speak. We in the North have forgiven, and we think that
the South should forget. It has come over me to-day how easy it is for
the conquerors to forgive and how hard that must be for the conquered."

"You do not understand even now," she said, her voice low with feeling.
"Because we are conquered we can forgive; but we should be less than
human to forget."

The room was very still for a little, and then, following out her
thought, she said as if in wonder: "And you, a Northerner, have felt
all this!"

He shook his head, with a little smile.

"It is perhaps too much to ask," returned he, "that you Southern women
should realize that even a Northerner is still human."

"Yes, yes; but to feel our suffering, to see--"

"It has always been facing me, I understand now, in my wife's eyes--the
immeasurable pathos of a people beaten in a struggle they felt to be
right; but she had been so happy otherwise, and she never spoke of it."

"In the heart of every Southern woman," she said solemnly, though now
without bitterness, "is always the anguish of our Lost Cause. We cover
the surface, we accept, and God knows we have been patient; but each of
us has deep down a sense of the blood that was poured out in vain, of
the agony of the men we loved, of how they were humiliated--humiliated,
and of the great cause of liberty lost--lost!"

For long, bitter years she had not spoken even to her nearest friends as
she was talking to this stranger, this Northerner. The consciousness of
this brought her back to the remembrance that he was the husband of her
daughter.

"Has your wife no relatives in the South who might have made you
understand how we Southern women must feel?" she asked.

He grew instantly colder.

"I have never seen her Southern relatives."

"Pardon the curiosity of an old woman," she went on, watching him
keenly; "may I ask why?"

"My wife's mother did not choose to know the Yankee her daughter
married."

"And you?"

"I did not choose to force an acquaintance or to be known on
sufferance," he answered crisply. "I was aware of no wrong, and I did
not choose to ask to be forgiven for being a Northerner."

She knew that in her heart she was already accepting this strong, fine
man, alien as he was to all the traditions of her life, and she was not
ill pleased at his pride.

"But have you ever considered what it must have cost the mother to give
up her daughter?"

"Why need she have given her up? Marriages between the North and the
South have been common enough without any family breach."

She was utterly sure that he knew neither to whom he was talking nor
what had been the real cause of her separation from her daughter. She
experienced a sort of wild inner exultation that at last had come the
moment when she might justify herself; when she might tell the whole
dreadful story which had been as eating poison in her veins. She raised
her head proudly, and looked at him with her whole soul in her eyes.

"If you have patience to listen," she said, feeling her cheeks warm,
"and will pardon my being personal, I should like to tell you what has
happened to me. My husband was a colonel in the Confederate army. We
were married when I was seventeen, in a brief furlough he won by being
wounded at the battle of the Wilderness. I saw him, in the four years of
the war before he fell at Five Forks, less than a dozen times, and
always for the briefest visits--poor scraps of fearful happiness torn
out of long stretches of agony. My daughter, my only child, was born
after her father's death. Our fortune had gone to the Cause. My father
and my husband both refused to invest money abroad. They considered it
disloyal, and they put everything into Confederate securities even after
they felt sure they should get nothing back. They were too loyal to
withhold anything when the country was in deadly peril."

She paused, but he did not speak, and with swelling breast and parching
throat she went on:--

"At Five Forks my husband was killed in a hand-to-hand fight with a
Northern officer. He struck his enemy down after he had received his own
death-wound. I pray God he did not know the day was lost. He had gone
through so much, I hope that was spared him. On the other side of death
he must have found some comfort to help him bear it. God must have had
some comfort for our poor boys when he permitted the cause of liberty to
be lost."

She pressed her clenched hand against her bosom, and as she did so her
eyes met those of her companion. She felt the sympathy of his look, but
something recalled her to the sense that she was speaking to one from
the North.

"It is not the cause of liberty to you," she said. "I have forgotten
again. I have not spoken of all this for so long. I have not dared; but
to-day--to-day I must speak, and you must forgive me if I use the old
language."

He dropped his glance as if he felt it an intrusion to see her bitter
emotion, and said softly: "I think I understand. You need not
apologize."

"After the war," she went on hurriedly and abruptly, "I lived for my
daughter. I worked for her. She--she was like her father."

She choked, but regained the appearance of composure by a mighty effort.

"When she was a woman--she was still a child to me; over twenty, but I
was not twice her age--she went North, and there she fell in love. She
wrote me that she was to marry a Northerner, and when she added his
name--it was the son of the man who killed her father."

"It is not possible!" the other exclaimed. "You imagined it. Such
things happen in melodramas--"

She put up her hand and arrested his words.

"This happened not in a melodrama, but in a tragedy--in my life," she
said. "I need not go into details. She married him, and I have never
seen her since."

"Did he know?"

"No. It was my wedding gift to my daughter--that I kept her secret. That
was all I had strength to do. You think I was an unnatural mother, of
course; but--"

She saw that his eyes were moist as he raised them in answering.

"I should have said so yesterday without any hesitation; to-day--"

"To-day?" she echoed eagerly, as he paused.

"To-day," he answered, letting his glance sweep over the pathetic
memorials so thick about them--"to-day at least I understand, and I do
not wonder."

She looked at him with all her heart in her eyes, trying to read his
most hidden feeling. Then she touched his arm lightly with the tips of
her slender black-gloved fingers.

"Come," she said.

She led him across the room, and pointed to a colonel's sash and pistols
which lay in one of the cases under a faded card.

"Those were my husband's."

"Those!" he cried. "You Louise's mother? It is impossible!"

"It may be impossible; but, as I said of the other thing, it is true."

"The other thing?" he repeated. "What--do you mean the thing you
said--that my father and he-- That cannot be true. I should surely have
known!"

"It is true," she insisted. "At the moment it happened they were
surrounded by our soldiers, and his own men probably did not realize
just what happened. But I--I know every minute of that fight! One of my
husband's staff had been at West Point with them both, and he told me.
He saw it, and tried to come between them. Your wife married you,
knowing you to be the son of the man who killed her father."

The Northerner passed his hand across his forehead as if to wipe away
the confusion of his mind. His eyes were cast down, but she saw that
their lids were wet.

"Poor Louise!" he murmured, seemingly rather to himself than to her;
"how she must have suffered over that secret. Poor Louise!"

"You come here," Mrs. Desborough went on, feeling herself choke at his
words, but determined not to give way to the warmer impulse of her
heart, "and even you are moved by these sacred relics. What do you think
they are to us?"

She was half conscious that she was appealing to the memorials around
her to strengthen her in her purpose not to yield, not to make peace
with the son of the man who had slain her husband, her hero, her love;
she felt that in harboring for an instant such an impulse she was untrue
to the Cause which, though lost, was for her forever living with the
deathless devotion of love and anguish.

"These relics do move me," her son-in-law said gently. "They move me so
deeply that they seem to me wrong. I confess that I was thinking, before
you came in, that if I were a Southerner, with the traditions of the
South behind me, and the bitter sense of failure to embitter me, they
would stir me to madness; that I should feel it impossible ever to be
loyal to anything but the South. The war is over. The South at last is
understood. She is honored for the incredible bravery with which, under
crushing odds, she fought for her conviction. Why prolong the inevitable
pain? Why gather these relics to nourish a feeling absolutely
untrue--the feeling that the Union is less your country than it is
ours?"

"Because it is just to the dead," she answered swiftly. "Because it
is only justice that we keep in remembrance how true they were, how
gallant, how brave, how noble, and--O God!--that we make some poor
record of what we of the South have suffered!"

He shook his head and sighed. She saw the tears in his eyes and did not
attempt to hide her own.

"Would you have it forgotten," she demanded passionately, "that the
grandfather of your son--the father of your wife--was one of God's
noblemen? Would you have him remembered only as a beaten rebel? I tell
you that if we had not gathered these memorials, every clod that was wet
with their blood would cry out against us! In the North you call these
men rebels; there is no battlefield in the South where the very rustle
of the grass does not whisper over their graves that they were patriots
and heroes! And this, poor though it be"--and she waved her hand to the
cases around them--"is the best memorial we can give them."

He made a step forward, and held out both his hands impulsively. She did
not take them, and they dropped again. He hesitated, and then drew back.

"It must be as it is," he said sadly. "Even if I blamed you women of
the South, I could not say so here. Only," he added, his voice falling,
"can you forget that the women of the North suffered too? I grew up
in the shadow of a grief so great that it sapped the very life of my
mother, and in the end killed her. Do you think I could visit that
upon the innocent head of Louise?--I did not mean, though, to speak of
myself, now that I know who you are. I will not intrude on you; but my
little son, with your husband's name and his mother's eyes, is certainly
guiltless. I will not come with him, but may I not send him with my man
to see you this afternoon, so that I may say to Louise that you have
kissed him and given him your blessing? Sorrow has taken away his other
grandmother."

It seemed to her that she could not endure the speaking of one syllable
more. Her whole body trembled, and she raised her hands in an impulsive
gesture which implored him to be silent. All the old mother-love for
Louise, the passionate crying of her lonely heart for this unseen
grandson with the blood of her dead husband warm in his veins, the
grief of black years and fidelity to old ideals, warred within her, and
tore her like wolves. She cast a glance around as if to find some way by
which she could flee from this position which it was too terrible to
face. Then she saw her companion look at her with infinite pity and
sadness.

"Then," he said, "I can only say good-by."

But she sprang forward as if she burst from chains, and threw herself
upon his breast, the agony of the long, bitter past gushing in a torrent
of hot tears.

"Oh, my son! my son!" she sobbed.




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Transcriber's Note

Double chapter headers and blank pages between chapters were removed.
One missing opening quote mark was added. Otherwise the original was
preserved, including inconsistent spelling of the dialect.





End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Intoxicated Ghost, by Arlo Bates

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