"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 navete 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 f.a.n.n.y 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 n.o.blest 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 Ess.e.x 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; pa.s.sed 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.