The Intoxicated Ghost Part 19

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 G.o.d 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 rea.s.suring Alice, left Carroll in a condition little conducive to sleep. All night he revolved in his head the circ.u.mstances 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 a.s.sembled 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 g.a.y.l.o.r.ds, 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 a.s.sembled 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 pa.s.s 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 un.o.btrusively 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 a.s.sumed 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 cla.s.ses 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 n.o.bles 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 pa.s.sion 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.