"Patience! And do not interrupt me with questions. I am giving away a secret which carries with it my--my reputation. Long before my marriage I had known Lord Clarenceux. He knew many women; I was one of them. That affair ended. I married Sullivan.
"I happened to be in Vienna at the time Lord Clarenceux was taken with brain fever. I was performing at a music-hall on the Prater. There was a great rage then for English singers in Vienna. I knew he was alone.
I remembered certain things that had pa.s.sed between us, and I went to him. I helped to nurse him. He was engaged to Rosa, but Rosa was far away, and could not come immediately. He grew worse. The doctors said one day that he must die. That night I was by his bedside. He got suddenly up out of bed. I could not stop him: he had the strength of delirium. He went into his dressing-room, and dressed himself fully, even to his hat, without any a.s.sistance.
""Where are you going?" I said to him.
""I am going to her," he said. "These cursed doctors say I shall die.
But I sha"n"t. I want her. Why hasn"t she come? I must go and find her."
"Then he fell across the bed exhausted. He was dying. I had rung for help, but no one had come, and I ran out of the room to call on the landing. When I came back he was sitting up in bed, all dressed, and still with his hat on. It was the last flicker of his strength. His eyes glittered. He began to speak. How he stared at me! I shall never forget it!
""I am dying!" he said hoa.r.s.ely. "They were right, after all. I shall lose her. I would sell my soul to keep her, yet death takes me from her. She is young and beautiful, and will live many years. But I have loved her, and where I have loved let others beware. I shall never be far from her, and if another man should dare to cast eyes on her I will curse him. The heat of my jealousy shall blast his very soul. He, too, shall die. Rosa was mine in life, and she shall be mine in death.
My spirit will watch over her, for no man ever loved a woman as I loved Rosa." Those were his very words, Carl. Soon afterwards he died."
She recited Clarenceux"s last phrases with such genuine emotion that I could almost hear Clarenceux himself saying them. I felt sure that she had remembered them precisely, and that Clarenceux would, indeed, have employed just such terms.
"And you believe," I murmured, after a long pause, during which I fitted the remarkable narration in with my experiences, and found that it tallied--"you believe that Lord Clarenceux could keep his word after death?"
"I believe!" she said simply.
"Then there is no hope for me, Emmeline?"
She looked at me vaguely, absently, without speaking, and shook her head. Her l.u.s.trous eyes filled with tears.
CHAPTER XIX
THE INTERCESSION
Just as I was walking away from the hotel I perceived Rosa"s victoria drawing up before the portico. She saw me. We exchanged a long look--a look charged with anxious questionings. Then she beckoned to me, and I, as it were suddenly waking from a trance, raised my hat, and went to her.
"Get in," she said, without further greeting. "We will drive to the Arc de Triomphe and back. I was going to call on Mrs. Sullivan Smith,--just a visit of etiquette,--but I will postpone that."
Her manner was constrained, as it had been on the previous day, but I could see that she was striving hard to be natural. For myself, I did not speak. I felt nervous, even irritable, in my love for her.
Gradually, however, her presence soothed me, slackened the tension of my system, and I was able to find a faint pleasure in the beauty of the September afternoon, and of the girl by my side, in the smooth movement of the carriage, and the general gaiety and color of the broad tree-lined Champs Elysees.
"Why do you ask me to drive with you?" I asked her at length, abruptly yet suavely. Amid the noise of the traffic we could converse with the utmost privacy.
"Because I have something to say to you," she answered, looking straight in front of her.
"Before you say it, one question occurs to me. You are dressed in black; you are in mourning for Sir Cyril, your father, who is not even buried. And yet you told me just now that you were paying a mere visit of etiquette to my cousin Emmeline. Is it usual in Paris for ladies in mourning to go out paying calls? But perhaps you had a special object in calling on Emmeline."
"I had," she replied at once with dignity, "and I did not wish you to know."
"What was it?"
"Really, Mr. Foster--"
""Mr. Foster!""
"Yes; I won"t call you Carl any more. I have made a mistake, and it is as well you should hear of it now. I can"t love you. I have misunderstood my feelings. What I feel for you is grat.i.tude, not love.
I want you to forget me."
She was pale and restless.
"Rosa!" I exclaimed warningly.
"Yes," she continued urgently and feverishly, "forget me. I may seem cruel, but it is best there should be no beating about the bush. I can"t love you."
"Rosa!" I repeated.
"Go back to London," she went on. "You have ambitions. Fulfil them.
Work at your profession. Above all, don"t think of me. And always remember that though I am very grateful to you, I cannot love you--never!"
"That isn"t true, Rosa!" I said quietly. "You have invited me into this carriage simply to lie to me. But you are an indifferent liar--it is not your forte. My dear child, do you imagine that I cannot see through your poor little plan? Mrs. Sullivan Smith has been talking to you, and it has occurred to you that if you cast me off, the anger of that--that thing may be appeased, and I may be saved from the fate that overtook Alresca. You were calling on Emmeline to ask her advice finally, as she appears to be mixed up in this affair. Then, on seeing me, you decided all of a sudden to take your courage in both hands, and dismiss me at once. It was heroic of you, Rosa; it was a splendid sacrifice of your self-respect. But it can"t be. Nothing is going to disturb my love. If I die under some mysterious influence, then I die; but I shall die loving you, and I shall die absolutely certain that you love me."
Her breast heaved, and under the carriage rug her hand found mine and clasped it. We did not look at each other. In a thick voice I called to the coachman to stop. I got out, and the vehicle pa.s.sed on. If I had stayed with her, I should have wept in sight of the whole street.
I ate no dinner that evening, but spent the hours in wandering up and down the long verdurous alleys in the neighborhood of the Arc de Triomphe. I was sure of Rosa"s love, and that thought gave me a certain invigoration. But to be sure of a woman"s love when that love means torture and death to you is not a complete and perfect happiness. No, my heart was full of bitterness and despair, and my mind invaded by a miserable weakness. I pitied myself, and at the same time I scorned myself. After all, the ghost had no actual power over me; a ghost cannot stab, cannot throttle, cannot shoot. A ghost can only act upon the mind, and if the mind is feeble enough to allow itself to be influenced by an intangible illusion, then--
But how futile were such arguments! Whatever the power might be, the fact that the ghost had indeed a power over me was indisputable. All day I had felt the spectral sword of it suspended above my head. My timid footsteps lingering on the way to the hotel sufficiently proved its power. The experiences of the previous night might be merely subjective--conceptions of the imagination--but they were no less real, no less fatal to me on that account.
Once I had an idea of not going to the hotel that night at all. But of what use could such an avoidance be? The apparition was bound by no fetters to that terrible sitting-room of mine. I might be put to the ordeal anywhere, even here in the thoroughfares of the city, and upon the whole I preferred to return to my lodging. Nay, I was the victim of a positive desire for that scene of my torture.
I returned. It was eleven o"clock. The apparition awaited me. But this time it was not seated in the chair. It stood with its back to the window, and its gaze met mine as I entered the room. I did not close the door, and my eyes never left its face. The sneer on its thin lips was bitterer, more devilishly triumphant, than before. Erect, motionless, and inexorable, the ghost stood there, and it seemed to say: "What is the use of leaving the door open? You dare not escape.
You cannot keep away from me. To-night you shall die of sheer terror."
With a wild audacity I sat down in the very chair which it had occupied, and drummed my fingers on the writing-table. Then I took off my hat, and with elaborate aim pitched it on to a neighboring sofa. I was making a rare pretence of carelessness. But moment by moment, exactly as before, my courage and resolution oozed out of me, drawn away by that mystic presence.
Once I got up filled with a brilliant notion. I would approach the apparition; I would try to touch it. Could I but do so, it would vanish; I felt convinced it would vanish. I got up, as I say, but I did not approach the ghost. I was unable to move forward, held by a nameless dread. I dropped limply back into the chair. The phenomena of the first night repeated themselves, but more intensely, with a more frightful torture. Once again I sought relief from the agony of that gaze by retreating into the bedroom; once again I was compelled by the same indescribable fear to return, and once again I fell down, smitten by a new and more awful menace, a kind of incredible blasphemy which no human thought can convey.
And now the ghost moved mysteriously and ominously towards me. With an instinct of defence, cowed as I was upon the floor, I raised my hand to ward it off. Useless attempt! It came near and nearer, imperceptibly moving.
"Let me die in peace," I said within my brain.
But it would not. Not only must I die, but in order to die I must traverse all the hideous tortures of the soul which that lost spirit had learnt in its dire wanderings.
The ghost stood over me, impending like a doom. Then it suddenly looked towards the door, startled, and the door swung on its hinges. A girl entered--a girl dressed in black, her shoulders and bosom gleaming white against the dark attire, a young girl with the heavenliest face on this earth. Casting herself on her knees before the apparition, she raised to that dreadful spectre her countenance transfigured by the ecstasy of a sublime appeal. It was Rosa.
Can I describe what followed? Not adequately, only by imperfect hints.
These two faced each other, Rosa and the apparition. She uttered no word. But I, in my stupor, knew that she was interceding with the spectre for my life. Her lovely eyes spoke to it of its old love, its old magnanimity, and in the name of that love and that magnanimity called upon it to renounce the horrible vengeance of which I was the victim.
For long the spectre gazed with stern and formidable impa.s.sivity upon the girl. I trembled, all hope and all despair, for the issue. She would not be vanquished. Her love was stronger than its hate; her love knew not the name of fear. For a thousand nights, so it seemed, the two remained thus, at grips, as it were, in a death-struggle. Then with a reluctant gesture of abdication the ghost waved a hand; its terrible features softened into a consent, and slowly it faded away.
As I lay there Rosa bent over me, and put her arms round my neck, and I could feel on my face the caress of her hair, and the warm baptism of her tears--tears of joy.