“I suggest to you that you are yourself Hélène Courvoisier!”
Vincent, guessing the purport of the words, held his breath in suspense. To his despair the young woman responded with a far-away but genuinely mirthful laugh.
“No! How absurd!” she said, laughing like a person under a drug. “I am Ottilie Rosenhagen! I was always Ottilie Rosenhagen!” She laughed again, hysterically, but more and more freely, more and more loudly, more and more the laugh of a person normally awake. Still laughing, she shuddered, passed her hand across her brow, relaxed suddenly from her stiff attitude—and ceased to laugh with a glance around of bewilderment. She fixed her eyes upon Chassaigne.
“I—I think I feel unwell,” she said, rising brusquely from her chair. “Excuse me!—I—I cannot stay!”
Without a glance behind her, she went swiftly from the room.
Vincent watched her go, anguish and despair in his eyes. He turned to Chassaigne.
“Well?” he asked, hoarsely.
Chassaigne made a gesture of annoyance. He shrugged his shoulders.
“I might have guessed as much!” he said. “He has rendered her immune to the suggestion. You see, the trance was induced easily enough. As I thought, she was accustomed to being hypnotized by that mirror and the mere sight of it was almost sufficient. Without that, I should certainly have failed to hypnotize her at all, for Breidenbach would assuredly have impressed upon her the suggestion that she could be hypnotized by no one but himself. He has furthermore guarded himself by impressing upon her that the suggestion of being anybody but Ottilie Rosenhagen will suffice to break the trance. He cannot be sure that such an impressionable subject may not be hypnotized, possibly by a chance accident—such things occur—in his absence. But he can be surethat any counter-suggestion on the vital matter will defeat itself—as we have just seen.”
“But can no one remove the suggestion?” cried Vincent. He glared around the room, clenching his fist. “The infernal scoundrel! By God, I’ll kill him!” He fingered the revolver, in the holster strapped to his belt.
Chassaigne laid a restraining hand upon him.
“If you do—you will in all probability kill the only man in the world who can replace the factitious personality of Ottilie Rosenhagen by the real personality of Hélène Courvoisier!”
Vincent stared at him.
“Do you mean that?”
“He certainly can remove the suggestions he has himself made. It is doubtful whether any other can.”
“He must be forced to do it! We must inform the authorities!”
“Agreed, my dear fellow!” Chassaigne’s voice was soothing. “But we must first get evidence—real evidence—that this young woman is not Ottilie Rosenhagen but Hélène Courvoisier. What evidence have we got now that we could put up before a tribunal? None. Merely your alleged recognition, as against her own emphatic denial that she is the person you maintain. And at the present time not even the most cunning cross-examination could elucidate the fact that she had ever known the French language. Ottilie Rosenhagen does not know French—and, at this moment, to all intents and purposes, sheisOttilie Rosenhagen!”
“Then we must get hold of him ourselves!”
“He will simply laugh at us as madmen—apply to have us removed from his house. No, my dear fellow, we cannot force the pace. Wait. Be patient. Arouse no suspicion in his mind. Our opportunity will come, be sure of that. The real personality of Hélène Courvoisier is there all the time, latent. I am confident that we shall—somehow—succeed in bringing it to the surface again.”
The young man shuddered.
“I wish I could see how!” he said, hopelessly.
“You will see it. I guarantee it,” said Chassaigne, forcing his cheerfulness. “Now, come away out of this house. We will go into Mainz, dine, spend the evening at a café, and forget it—or talk it over, as you will. We can do nothing more now.” He smiled at him. “Come! As your superior officer, I command you!”
The hour was late when the two officers returned. Before going out, Chassaigne had provided himself with a key, and they let themselves into the house. It was quiet, its occupants apparently in bed. Throughout the evening there had been but one topic of conversation and, as it was yet unexhausted, they went into Doctor Breidenbach’s library, switched on the lights, and sat down for a final smoke before retiring.
“What we require,” said Chassaigne, for the twentieth time, as he lit his cigarette, “is demonstrable evidence, something that makes it certain that you are not under an illusion. Even in my own mind, I cannot help confessing, there is a doubt. Look at it from my point of view. You assure me that you recognize the young woman. Good—but your recognition may be an error, although sincere. You strengthen your case by pointing to the three moles. But, if I were questioned, I should be bound to admit that you did not mention those moles until you had seen them on this woman. You may be suffering from a not uncommon delusion of memory which refers to the past a thing now for the first time perceived. The strongest piece of evidence we possess is that, under the physical analysis to which we subjected the young woman, I found that she was a hypnotic subject, that she was impressible, and that her personality as Ottilie Rosenhagen is practically without any memories of the past.But we could not discover any trace of any other personality.She rejects as ridiculous the suggestion that she is not Ottilie Rosenhagen. That proves nothing, in the special circumstances we are considering. She might or might not still be Hélène Courvoisier. But the theory on which we havebeen working presupposes a crime so unique, that, quite frankly, to be entirely convinced I want to come upon some trace of a submerged personality which tallies with your assertion. If she is Hélène Courvoisier that personality is certainly there. But how are we going to get at it?”
Vincent shook his head.
“I cannot imagine,” he said, wearily.
He looked up to see Chassaigne staring in astonishment at the door behind his chair. Startled, he twisted himself round to see what was happening—and gasped.
Framed in the doorway, a dressing-gown over her night-attire, her dark hair loose over her shoulders, was the young woman. In her hand was a bedroom candle, alight. Her face was expressionless and placid. Her eyes were open, looked fixedly in front of her. She moved into the room with a gliding step.
“She is asleep!” whispered Chassaigne. “Speak to her, Vincent!—who knows?—Perhaps another stratum of personality!”
The young woman glided straight toward the lieutenant, who gripped at the arm of the chair in his emotion. She was close upon him ere he could force himself to speech.
“Hélène!” he said in a tense, low voice, looking up into her eyes as if trying to bring her dream down to him. “Do you know me?”
She bent over him, kissed him softly upon the brow.
“Maxime!” she murmured, her tone vibrant with tender affection. “Maxime! You have been away so long!”
She spoke in French!
Chassaigne jumped in his chair, but before he could utter a word, a new voice spoke sharply.
“Ottilie!”
The two officers turned to the doorway to see Doctor Breidenbach standing there, his face clouded with menace, his eyes angry.
The young woman started, looked wildly about her in the bewilderment of one suddenly aroused from sleep. Then after one horrified glance at her attire, an amazed stare at the two officers, she sank down on to a chair and covered her face with her hands. Trembling violently in every nerve of her body, she crouched there in a misery of shame, too overwhelmed to utter a sound.
The German advanced into the room, stood over her.
“Ottilie! Come away at once!”
Vincent, now on his feet, flushed with rage at the brutal tone of the command, comprehensible enough to him despite his ignorance of the language.
Chassaigne went quietly behind the German, locked the door, and slipped the key in his pocket.
Breidenbach, his eyes fixed on the girl, reiterated his command.
“Monsieur!” broke from Vincent in an angry expostulation which ignored his comrade’s gesture to silence.
The German looked round upon him, forcing his face to a smile in which the vivid blue eyes behind the pince-nez failed to participate.
“You are certainly entitled to some explanation of this unseemly occurrence, gentlemen,” he said in French. His voice, perfectly controlled and reinforcing his smile, suggested an appreciation of piquancy in this equivocal situation, invited the sense of humour of the Gallic temperament. “I need not tell you that Fräulein Rosenhagen is entirely innocent of any intent to disturb you. She is, I may say, under my medical care. She suffers from somnambulism, and you will understand that it is comprehensible she should wander to this room where she is accustomed to receive treatment.”
Vincent, with difficulty, controlled himself to silence in obedience to his friend’s warning glance. Chassaigne stepped forward.
“Quite, monsieur,” he said, easily, smiling as though he fully appreciated the position from all points of view. “A case of abnormal subconscious activity. I am myselfgreatly interested, professionally, in this common neuro-pathological symptom. May I suggest that, since your patient has come here in response to an obscure instinctive desire for the accustomed treatment of which she is doubtless in need, you now satisfy her? I should esteem it a privilege to assist at a demonstration of your methods.”
The German’s eyes flashed a suspicion that was instantly veiled.
“The hour is late, monsieur,” he said, coldly.
Chassaigne shrugged his shoulders good-humouredly.
“In our profession, monsieur—the service of humanity,” he said with sly malice, “one is on duty at all hours.”
The German’s eyes expressed frank hostility.
“I do not consider it advisable,” he said. His tone was curt.
Chassaigne glanced at the young woman still crouched upon the chair.
“As a professional man of some experience, monsieur,” he said, imperturbably, “I do not agree with you. I feel sure your patient would benefit by it. Let me beg of you!”
The German trembled with sudden anger.
“This is an unwarrantable interference, monsieur! The patient is in my charge. I decline absolutely!” He turned to the girl. “Come, Ottilie!” he added in German.
She ventured a shrinking glance up at him, stirred as if to rise.
Chassaigne raised his hand in a gesture which checked her. His eyes met the German’s in a direct challenge.
“Unreasonable as it sounds, monsieur, I have set my heart upon witnessing your methods. It is a whim of the conqueror—the force of which you, who have served in Belgium, will appreciate.” His right hand slid into the pocket of his tunic. “I must insist!”
“I refuse, then!” The German was livid with rage. He turned and plucked the girl violently from her seat. “Out of my way, monsieur!”
Dragging the girl after him, he took two steps toward the door—and stopped suddenly. Two more steps would have brought him into contact with the muzzle of the revolver which Chassaigne levelled at him.
“Foreseeing your possible ill-humour, monsieur,” said the Frenchman, with a mocking suavity, “I took the precaution of locking the door. This young woman has inspired me with so violent an interest that I cannot bear to see her suffer unrelieved. And I might remind you that should you unfortunately lose your life by the accidental explosion of this revolver—I should find it comparatively easy to restore her to complete mental health myself.”
The German glared at him.
“I do not understand you!”
“You do—perfectly!” Chassaigne turned to his friend. “Vincent, conduct that young lady to a chair!”
The girl, who had been released by the German in the first shock of his surprise, stood paralyzed with terror, staring speechlessly at the revolver in Chassaigne’s hand. Unresistingly, she allowed herself to be led to a chair by the young man who was as speechless as she.
Chassaigne nodded satisfaction.
“Good! Now, Vincent, draw your revolver and cover this gentleman yourself. Be careful to hit him in a vital spot should you be compelled to fire.”
Vincent obeyed with alacrity, dangling the heavy weapon with fingers that evidently itched to pull the trigger.
“Monsieur,” said Chassaigne with grim courtesy to the German who had remained motionless under the menace of the revolver, “I invite you to take a seat. You may keep your hands on your knees, but do not move them until I give permission.”
The German sat down heavily, his eyes gleaming evilly at the Frenchman.
“Now, monsieur,” said Chassaigne, in succinct tones, “since you say you do not understand, I will be moreexplicit. I desire that you should induce in this young woman the hypnotic trance which is your habitual treatment for her indisposition——”
A gleam of cunning flitted in the German’s eyes.
“Very well,” he said, with sulky submission. “If you insist!”
“But with this difference,” continued Chassaigne, “that your habitual suggestion shall be reversed!”
The German started—controlled himself quickly.
“I do not understand,” he said, maintaining his pose of sulkiness.
“I mean that instead of suggesting to her that she is and always has been Ottilie Rosenhagen—you suggest to her that she is really Hélène Courvoisier, a French girl deported from Lille!”
The muscles stood out suddenly upon the German’s lean jaws, even as, with a strength of will Chassaigne could not but admire, he smiled mockingly into his adversary’s face.
“You rave, monsieur!” he said, and his tone emphasized the insult.
“Rave or not,” replied Chassaigne, calmly, “I want you to try the experiment. It is a whim of mine.” He handled the revolver suggestively.
“And if I refuse?”
“I shall shoot you!”
The German laughed outright.
“Ottilie!” he cried, in German, “these Frenchmen have gone mad. They pretend that you are not Ottilie Rosenhagen but a French girl—and they want to take you from me!”
The girl sprang from her seat with a cry of horror, rushed to him, and flung her arms about him.
“Oh, no, no!” she cried. “I am German—I am German—I was never anything but German! Oh, don’t take me away from him! I love him! I love him! He is all I have in the world!”
Vincent watched the action with jealous rage.
“My God!” he muttered. “I shall kill him in another moment if this goes on!”
The German smiled at them triumphantly.
“You see, gentlemen! Your suggestion is fantastic! This girl is my fiancée, and she is German to the core!”
Chassaigne’s face was stern.
“Vincent! Remove the lady!”
The young man had to tear her by force from the German, who remained immobile in his chair in a mocking respect for the revolver.
“Fantastic or not,” said Chassaigne, “I demand that you try the experiment. If you refuse—it is because you dare not do it!”
The German shrugged his shoulders.
“Very good, monsieur. I refuse. Think what you will!”
Chassaigne drew his watch from his pocket.
“I give you three minutes to decide,” he said. “Vincent! Put the lady in that armchair and be ready to shoot when I give the word. Two bullets are more sure than one!”
The girl, dazed with fright, looking as though she were in some awful dream, collapsed nervelessly into the chair. Vincent posted himself by the German’s side, his levelled revolver held just out of reach of a sudden snatch.
The German tried one more expostulation.
“This is madness!” he cried. “You surely do not propose to commit a cold-blooded murder!”
“One!” said Chassaigne, grimly. “Two more minutes, monsieur!”
The German laughed diabolically.
“Very well, then! Commit your murder! Much will it profit you! I am the only man in the world who can influence that young woman. Whatever you may think, you cannot transform her personality. Ottilie Rosenhagen she is and Ottilie Rosenhagen she will remain!”
“Two!” said Chassaigne.
“You may as well shoot now! Don’t wait for the third!” jeered the German. “I deny that she is other than Ottilie Rosenhagen. I utterly refuse to experiment upon her at your dictation. Shoot! I defy you!” The man certainly did not lack courage. He smiled mockingly as Chassaigne’s revolver rose slowly and deliberately to a level with his eyes. “Shoot! Outrage for outrage, your murder of a German civilian may well balance the deportations you prate about!” It was significant that in this fateful crisis it should be that particular crime which occurred to him for parity.
The taunt seemed to strike the spark of an idea in Chassaigne’s brain. Still menacing the German with his revolver, he held out the key to the door in his left hand.
“Vincent! In Doctor Briedenbach’s hall there is a telephone. A hundred yards away there is a post of infantry. Ring up the commandant, tell him that I have arrested Doctor Breidenbach on the charge of abducting a French subject, ask him to send along an armed escort at once—not less than half a dozen!” He glanced at the girl, who was apparently in a swoon upon her chair. “It is important that the force should be imposing! Hurry!”
Vincent snatched at the key, and dashed from the room.
The German smiled in grim contempt. Chassaigne, still covering him with the revolver, smiled back, not less grimly. They waited in a complete silence, through minute after minute. The girl upon the chair did not stir.
Suddenly they heard the rhythmic tramp of a body of armed men on the gravel outside, a sharp voice of command, and then, after a brief pause, the heavy multiple tramp again, resounding through the house, louder and louder in its approach. At the sound, the girl sat up brusquely, stared wild-eyed at the door.
It was flung open. Vincent entered, pointed out thegirl to the French officer who accompanied him, evidently in confirmation of a statement made outside. The officer barked an order. A file of helmeted infantrymen, bayoneted rifles at the slope, marched heavily into the room. The girl shrieked.
“Oh, no! no! Don’t take me!” she cried—and her cry was French! “Don’t take me! I will not go! I will not go!” She sprang up from her chair, looked frenziedly around the room in a terror-stricken search for an avenue of escape. Her eyes fell upon Vincent remained curiously fixed upon him. Suddenly, with a cry of recognition, she rushed into his arms. “Maxime! Maxime! Protect me! Oh, don’t let them take me! Don’t let them take me!”
Chassaigne smiled. He had won. As he expected, the shock of this armed entry so vividly recalled the night of terror in Lille when the girl-victims were snatched from their violated homes, had sufficed to reawaken the personality which had then agonized in its last moments of freedom.
Vincent enfolded her, murmuring reassuring words as he caressed the head that hid itself upon his breast. Her body shook with violent sobs.
The German stood up, placed himself, with a shrug of the shoulders, between the double file of infantrymen. The officer produced a notebook, asked a few questions of Chassaigne, jotted down the replies. He turned to the girl.
“Your name, mademoiselle?”
She looked up.
“Hélène Courvoisier,” she replied, unhesitatingly.
The clock upon the mantelpiece struck, discreetly, the hour of eleven in the night-stillness of the study where old Henry Arkwright worked. He glanced up with busy, preoccupied brows to the dial, confirming his half-registered impression of the tale of strokes. Eleven o’clock! He would work for another two or three hours yet. He sucked cheerfully at his pipe as he signed the just-written counsel’s opinion; folded the stiff, long documents and tied them neatly with their original tape; took yet another legal case from the pile in front of him. He felt himself in form to-night, enjoyed the efficiency of his brain that worked so swiftly and surely in this solitude. The complete silence of the house was subtly grateful to him. He was immune from all disturbance. The servants had long since gone to bed. His concentration upon his task was unthreatened, the stores of legal knowledge held ready for his use in that practised brain of his unobscured by any concrete trivialities. Eleven o’clock—yes, he could put in another three hours good work before, exhausted to-night like all the other nights, he went slowly up the empty stairs to his empty bedroom. He adjusted himself to consideration of the affidavits he unfolded.
What was that? The faint ringing of the door-bell, far away in the servants’ quarters but distinctly audible in this sleep-hushed house, persisted until it came to his full recognition. He looked up, puzzled, from the papers in the shaded light of his reading-lamp, glanced around the book-lined study where the fire-glow flickered redly in the absence of full illumination. Who could it be at thistime of night? The far-away faint ringing continued, eloquent of an unrelaxed pressure upon the bell-push at the porch. He listened to it with exasperated annoyance, resentful of this interruption of his labours, trying to imagine an identity for this inconsiderately late visitor. Whoever it was, he himself would have to open the door. The servants were long ago asleep. They would not hear the bell. With a petulant exclamation, he rose from his desk, went out into the darkened hall.
Stimulated into haste in instinctive response to the determined urgency of the summons of that bell, its sound quite loud and definite out here, he fumbled hurriedly for the electric switch. Then, the lights full on, he went quickly to the door and opened it. A cold wind blew in upon him from the darkness into which he peered, seeing, at first, nothing. The ringing had ceased. A doubt of reality, a suspicion of hallucination, shot through him, was dispelled upon the instant. From the shadowed side of the porch a woman’s form moved into the broad beam of light. A curious, inexplicable, sudden consciousness of his own heart, vaguely not normal in its action, filled his breast as he stared out to her in a momentary suspense of recognition. Then she turned her face full upon him.
He started back, shocked to his inmost as though he had touched a live electric wire.
“Christine!” he gasped, in incredulous amazement. “Christine!—You!—Come back?”
The eyes in the woman’s drawn face opened upon him as from a tight-shut agony, searched what was to her his dark, featureless silhouette in the illumination from the hall. Her whole soul seemed to yearn out to him in doubt and in desperate appeal. He saw her lips move before she spoke.
“Will you let me in?” she asked, humbly. “Harry!” She breathed his name as though she dared not pronounce it.
He felt himself turn dizzy under this unexpectedemotional shock. He stared at her dumbly, the scathing phrases of indignant repudiation, so often mentally rehearsed for such a moment, eluding him. Christine! He could not at once adjust himself to her reality, looked at her again to make unmistakably sure. Christine—come back.
“Harry!” she breathed again in timid humility.
He shuddered in a cold gust from the darkness as he stared at her. She was hatless, coatless, in that bitter wind. He saw her shiver as she half-ventured to stretch out a hand toward him.
A sudden impulse, as from a source superior to him—he thought it was pity—mastered the righteous indignation he had been trying to bring to utterance.
“Come in,” he said, thickly, and made way for her.
She entered. He shut the door behind her, turned to look at her as she stood in the full illumination of the hall. Once more her eyes had closed. Her lips were compressed as over an almost unendurable agony of the spirit. She swayed on her feet, arms limply by her sides, as though only stayed from falling by a supreme effort of the will. How old and haggard she looked!—the thought traversed him like a flash, linked itself to another—twenty-five years! What had happened to her in that twenty-five years? Little of good fortune, assuredly—with the professional eye that appraised a new witness in the box, he noted the poor, threadbare quality of her white dress, unadorned by any of the jewellery that had once been her delight.
The chilled blueness of her skin struck him as he scrutinized her. He touched her hand, automatically and impersonally, for confirmation of his impression.
“You’re frozen!” he said. His accent of ill-humour rang oddly familiar in his own ears. It was the old annoyance at yet another of the impulsive follies so typical of her. “What are you thinking of, to come out like this?” he added, sharply. “Here!” He flung open the study door. “There’s a fire here—sit downand warm yourself!” The tone of unsympathetic authority was—he remembered it—instinctively just the old tone he had so often used to her in that life now so remote as almost to seem a previous existence.
She opened her eyes again, the large emotional eyes that had not changed, looked at him, lookedinto him. Incredulity spread over her face.
“By your fire? Can you, Harry?—Can you, after everything—after all these years—can you still have me by your fire?”
Tears came up in those big eyes which looked so yearningly into his, and her mouth twisted itself into a pathetic little smile—the ghost of the smile that he had known in a younger face. He felt oddly uncomfortable.
“Come along!” He commanded her almost brutally, defending himself from any relaxation of hostility. “Come and warm yourself!” He lifted one of her hands and its chill struck to the centre of him. “Why have you no coat?—You must be mad!”
She smiled at him, and did not answer. He drew her into the warm study, pulled a chair close to the fire for her, pressed her down into it. Then he turned to switch on the full lights.
She stopped him with a gesture.
“Please, Harry!—Just like this—in the firelight.”
He obeyed and returned to her. Coldness seemed to emanate from her body as he came close. What sheer insanity! She must be chilled through and through, he thought.
He shrugged his shoulders to himself, disclaiming responsibility, and, for his own self-respect, played the host.
“Can I get you anything, Christine?” he asked, ungraciously. “Anything to eat or drink?”
She lifted her large eyes toward his face and shook her head slowly, without a word.
Baffled by her manner, he struck at what he thought to be the heart of the awkward situation.
“What do you want? What have you come for?” he demanded, harshly. “Money?”
She shook her head again and smiled.
“No, Harry. I want nothing, except just to be with you once again—for a little time.”
A long sigh, from the depths of her bosom, escaped her as she turned her head down again to the fire and stared dreamily into its red recesses.
“Just to be with you,” she repeated, softly, as to herself, “once more.”
He stood over her, not knowing what to say. Silence filled the room.
She looked up at him, timidly.
“You’re not pleased to see me, are you, Harry? You never wanted to see me again?”
He did not answer.
“Of course—how could you be?” she murmured to herself, gazing once more into the fire. “You never could forgive—never!”
He forced himself to a politeness he felt to be magnanimous.
“I don’t want to dwell on past injuries, Christine,” he said, coldly. “I should be pleased to know that what you did brought happiness.”
“Happiness!” she repeated, almost inaudibly, in ironic mockery, her gaze still fixed upon the fire.
Suddenly she looked round to him.
“Harry!” she said, impulsively. “Harry!” Her eyes went beyond him for a moment to the litter of papers on his desk, returned to him. “Harry! I know I am disturbing you”—the old pathetic smile came into her face—“but I want to ask you a favour—” she hesitated, as though her courage failed her—“the favour for which I came.”
He hardened himself for a refusal.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I want you to give up your work for just one hour—I want you to sit by the fireside and talk to me. Won’tyou? Won’t you let me come first for just once—as—as I used to want to in the old days?” Her eyes, fine as ever, implored him in almost irresistible appeal. “I have dreamed of this for so long!” She went on as in a reverie, after a little pause, staring once more into the fire. “You never would, Harry—and perhaps—if you had——” She sighed. “You were so ambitious!”
He stood immobile, typically reluctant to break his habits. Those cases were important. He was coming to himself now, the effect of the first shock diminishing. Some of the old anger awoke in his heart as he looked down upon her. The old sense of disturbance returned. It was just like her to come and break up his night’s work. And now—after all that had happened! He resented her presumption, stigmatized it as sheer callousness.
She looked up, feeling his thoughts perhaps.
“Harry! Can’t you—for just this once? I don’t ask you to forgive.”
Her eyes held him, enfeebled his resistance.
“I’ve got nothing to tell you, Christine,” he said, gruffly. “Nothing. I didn’t ask you to come back, but since you have come—well, I will not shut you out in the cold. You can sit by the fire if you like.”
She smiled—the little ghost of her twenty-year-old smile upon that worn and middle-aged face. He clenched his teeth at it, at something in himself.
“Have you really nothing to say to me, Harry? Not a question to ask?”
He armed himself against the pathos of her appeal.
“No,” he said, curtly. “Nothing.”
She shut her eyes as though under a blow. Then, with a tacit admission of its justice, she smiled up at him again. Evidently, her courage was held at high tension.
“I know I don’t deserve it,” she said. “I don’t deserve to be sitting here again, after all these years. But, oh, Harry, youcouldbe generous—once, at those rare times when I could really touch the real you as I so often longed to do. Are you still hard, Harry?—still so hard?”She sighed, wearily, turned her head hopelessly once more to the fire.
He watched the play of its glow over her features, was struck by her bad colour. The coldly observant part of him noted the fact that she was, or had been, ill. Half-starved, too, added this detached professional self. Suffering, physical and mental, was stamped upon her face. He acquiesced in it, grimly. Her frivolous wickedness—he remembered the callously jaunty tone of the note she had left for him—had met just retribution. He wondered what had happened to the man.
She looked up again, answering, with a subtle perception, the question in his mind.
“He’s dead, Harry—dead years ago. Very dead. To me, he never really lived—not as you have lived, always, through every moment of my—” she paused—“my Hell.”
A sentiment of pity pricked him sharply. Poor little Christine!—she had certainly paid, and paid heavily. He repressed his commiseration, in alarm at himself. He must think—think sensibly. Did she intend to come back for good? He reacted violently against the idea. It was impossible. He would be a laughing-stock, the butt for the pointing fingers, the sly allusions, of his fellows in the Courts. His pride revolted. No, no—he must get her out again somehow, before the servants knew.
Once more she read his thought.
“No one shall know that I have come, Harry. It’s just for this one hour and then I’ll go again. But just for this one hour—Harry!” She stretched out her arms to him. “Be generous!”
He fenced stubbornly.
“What, exactly, do you want, Christine?”
She smiled at him, her face radiant.
“I want—I want just to pretend that it all never happened. I want, just once, to sit with you by the fireside as though I had been here all these years—as thoughyou and I had learned to be the comrades I had dreamed we should be. I want to sit with you as we should have sat, both of us now growing old, looking back on all the beautiful things of our life together. Harry!” She lifted her arms to him again, yearning out to him. “Just once—just once to pretend—to be as we might have been—and then I can go away and really and truly die, satisfied. Be generous, Harry, be generous just this once if you never are again.”
An obscure feeling stirred in him, a sense of tears that threatened as he looked down into the eyes that swam with moisture.
“You nearly broke my life, Christine,” he said, with a hardly achieved attempt at harshness.
“I want to forget it,” she answered. “To believe—for just one hour—that I made your life, as I wanted to help make it. Oh, Harry, Harry, I love you—I have always loved you, wherever I have been and whatever I have done—and I want to believe, oh, for just such a little minute, that my love was not really in vain. I just had to come!”
He pressed his hand over his eyes, did not answer.
She pointed to the comrade chair by the fireside.
“Harry—Harry dear—sit down and talk to me as we ought to have been able to sit and talk—old married lovers with never a cloud between us.”
“Oh—don’t!” he said. “Don’t, Christine!” He burst out with a sudden anger. “Why have you come back? I—I wanted to forget, forget always.”
She reached for his hand, touched it with fingers that were still cold.
“And we are going to forget—going to forget it quite, for just a little hour, Harry, Harry darling!”
Her voice, on the old remembered note of fondness, touched him with a strange power. Something crumbled in him.
He sat down suddenly in the indicated chair, stared, he also, into the fire.
“It’s a bitter mockery, Christine!”
“No,” she answered. “It’s the real thing—for just once—the real thing.”
They sat in silence for long moments where the clock ticked loudly. She stretched her hand out to him.
“Harry! Hold my hand in yours—like you used to do—in the old days before you married me. It will help so much. Can you remember it?—the old touch that used to thrill?”
He obeyed without a word, took her little palm between his two large hands, pressed it close. Its death-like coldness struck him and, in defiance of it, he emphasized his contact. With a sudden tenderness that was awkwardly unpractised, he endeavoured to instil a little of his own warmth into it. As he did so, he felt as it were a sluice-gate open in him. A long-repressed sentimentality asserted itself, invaded his lonely soul like a flood. He looked at her. If only—his protective secondary personality, dominant for so many years, reacted jealously, perverted his regret—if only she could have understood him a little more!
It was she who spoke.
“I’m so proud of you, Harry—so proud of your success!”
He almost started—remembering how he had hoped that she would read his name in the newspapers, in a vindictive desire that she should regret what she had thrown away. He saw, suddenly, that it was only her opinion that had ever really mattered to him.
“My dear,” he said, feeling himself a tolerant old man who could afford to be kind from his altitude, “perhaps if I had never known you, I should never have worked so hard.”
She smiled at him as though there were no irony in his words, but only a beautiful truth.
“Harry—Harry darling!” she murmured. “I have helped—helped a little, haven’t I? My love has been what you said it would be—the vital force on which youcould always draw? Do you remember that, the night we were engaged?”
This cool assumption of a dream, utterly opposed to the facts, startled him. He looked at her, and had not the heart to contradict. Suppose it had been so? Could he surrender himself to this make-believe which she was playing with an almost childish simplicity? It was suddenly very tempting to him.
“I remember, my dear—and I promised,” his voice broke a little while he hesitated on a self-reproach, “never—never to cut myself off from it—never to say the harsh word which you warned me would freeze your sensitive little soul.”
“And you never have, Harry,” she murmured, softly. “You’ve always remembered—always been gentle and kind and loving—all these long years of happiness together.”
His eyes felt sympathetically uncomfortable as he looked into hers, moist in the firelight.
“Twenty-seven years, dear,” he said, caressingly, consciously defiant of the jealous self that watched. He had taken the plunge. “Twenty-seven years last week since we married.”
She nodded her head in acquiescence.
“We’ve had our life-time, Harry dear—and we have not wasted it, have we? Every year has been full, full to the brim, with sympathy and love.” She sighed, gazing into the fire. “And that’s the only thing in life that matters—the only thing. Success without love would have been very barren to you, wouldn’t it, Harry?” Her eyes came round to him.
“Dead Sea fruit, my darling,” the illusion was almost perfect to him, the irony without bitterness, scarcely perceived, “dust and ashes at the core.” He smiled at her from a strangely sentimental self that was almost foreign to him and yet his own. “Christine, without you I should not really have lived.”
She answered him with a movement of the fingers now warm between the hands still holding them.
“Nor I, Harry, without you. You and I were each other’s Destiny.”
He, too, nodded his head solemnly.
“Yes, dear,” he agreed. “I believe that.”
“And, thank God, we have not thwarted it, Harry. We have enjoyed it to the full.”
He pressed her hand tightly for his only answer. Dream or reality, was it? He had almost lost the power to distinguish. He looked into her face, softly happy and somehow nobler and purer than he had ever known it, pressed her hand again in a vague necessity to substantiate the tangible actuality of her presence. It was really Christine sitting there, filling that usually empty chair, breathing with slight rise and fall of her bosom as she gazed into the fire. And if the other were a dream—the happy past that she called up in imagination—just an old man’s dream, why he would allow himself, that sentimental self in him that none but himself had ever seen, the happiness of the illusion to the full. There was none to ridicule him for a childish make-believe, unworthy of his dignity.
“Christine,” he said, gently, “are you happy?”
She smiled at him upon her sigh.
“Very happy, dear.”
Again there was a silence between them. Presently she looked up once more.
“It’s splendid the way Phil is getting on, isn’t it, dear?”
He glanced at her from his own dream, uncomprehending. She went on, as though discussing a subject thoroughly familiar.
“Do you remember we said we would call him Philip—our first boy—long before we had him? When we used to talk about him, in those first happy months of being together, it didn’t seem possible that it could ever be really true, did it, dear? And yet there he is—twenty-four years old! It’s difficult for me to think that I evercould have been his mother. When I look at him, so tall and big, it seems impossible that he could once have been my baby.”
He stared at her. What was she talking of? They had never had a child. Then it came to him——
“Yes, dear. He’s a fine chap.”
She smiled at him gratefully.
“I think we were right to let him marry, don’t you, dear? I know he’s very young—but it’s perhaps better than if he waited until he became set in his own habits and could no longer share the youthful high-spirits of his dear little wife—as you very nearly waited too long, didn’t you, dear? Another year or two of getting wrapped up in your own ambitions and you might have crushed all the young life out of me.” Her tone was dreamily sincere.
“Don’t, Christine!” he said, thickly. “I know a lot of it was my fault——”
“Shh!” she soothed him with a gesture of her disengaged hand. “We’re talking about Phil and his charming little wife. She’s just the sort of girl I would have chosen for him, Harry. Young, sensible, pretty, with eyes that look you straight in the face—and she loves him, Harry, like I loved you, with all her young soul.”
He made a little choking sound and pressed her hand—so warm and loving now!—with a convulsive tightness.
“And soon, Harry,” she went on, “we shall be grandparents, you and I—looking forward beyond the next generation to the one after—living forward. Life is very wonderful, isn’t it, dear, in its continuity? Our little lives cease, but something of us goes on and on, in generations that we can’t even imagine. Oh, it’s very wonderful!” She sighed. “To think we might have missed it all, if we had not loved!”
“Christine!” He could scarcely speak. “You’re torturing me!”
“Shh!” she said. “It’s all real—it’s all realnow.Everything else was a bad dream from which we have waked together.”
“If only we could keep awake!” he said, pressing her hand in his as though he would never let it go.
She looked at him archly.
“You were always pessimistic, Harry, weren’t you? Do you remember how you used to say we should never have the little girl for whom we longed, just because we longed for her so much? And now there’s Jeanie! Jeanie who’ll be having her twenty-first birthday in a month or two! And you are proud of her, aren’t you, Harry? Of course you are! We are both proud of such a daughter, just the daughter we imagined.”
He closed his eyes.
“I remember—I remember how we used to talk of the daughter we were going to have. It seems very long ago, Christine, those first months of our life together.”
She smiled.
“And there she is, all our dreams of her coming true, asleep upstairs and very likely herself dreaming of the woman’s life that is opening before her. She’s very real to you, isn’t she, Harry?”
He forced himself to speech with an effort.
“Yes, dear. Go on.”
“She’s worth all the anxieties we had with her—the anxieties we never imagined. Do you remember, when she was a little golden-haired prattler, that awful time when she was ill? Do you remember how I nursed her, night and day—and how you would come tip-toeing to her tiny cot and look down upon it, praying with all your soul that she would not die? I think that was when you first began really to love her very much, Harry—when you thought you might lose her.” She nodded her head in dreamy reminiscence, staring into the fire. “I remember how proud I was when you gave up your work for a day or two because you felt you could not leave the house while she was in danger. It was such a miracle for you to do that—like Joshua stopping the sun—andall because of our tiny little Jeanie. It made me love you, oh, ever so much more, Harry!”
“Go on!” he said, closing his eyes again. “Go on!”
“And then how proud of her you were while she was at school! She always had your brains, Harry, didn’t she? Always she was at the top of her class. I remember”—she smiled—“I used to fear that she might grow too clever and wear spectacles. But there was just that bit of me—of the frivolous me—in her, wasn’t there, Harry? And so just like her mother she grew up to like pretty frocks and look as charming in them as I used to want to look for you to admire me.”
“Never so charming as you used to look, Christine, when you were twenty-one,” he said, his eyes lighting up with a genuine memory. “No one could look prettier than you did.”
Her warm fingers curled in his hard hands and her smile came up to him.
“Thank you, dear. It is nice of you not to forget.”
He breathed a long sigh.
“For every day of twenty-five years, Christine, I have seen you as you used to look then.” There was an emphasis in his subdued and deliberate enunciation that was eloquent of past agonies.
“It was the real Christine, Harry, that twenty-one-year-old Christine who was so proud to be your wife and knew herself to be so unworthy of you.”
“No, no!” he said, hoarsely. “Not unworthy—I didn’t understand then. If only I had understood—if I had not been so absorbed in the things I wanted to do——”
“Shh!” she soothed him. “It was all very beautiful, our life together, Harry dear. Do you remember the holidays we had alone together? Do you remember Switzerland, and the great mountains that towered up behind our hotel, the snow upon their summits orange against deep blue in the first sunshine of the dawn? Do you remember how we used to wake up to look at them,and said it was just like the pictures, only more wonderful because we were actually there? Do you remember being among the great fields of narcissi, with blue gentian higher up, and reminding me that this was what you had promised to show me—those fields on fields of wild flowers which you had seen when you were a young student, years before? Do you remember the mountain stream with the big boulders where we ate sandwiches on a little patch of turf between the rocks, and you kissed me just as those other people came down the path? I remember—I remember how I went hot all over and yet was very proud and happy, because it was the first time that any one else had ever seen you loving me. You used to pretend—do you remember?—to be a little cold and distant toward me when we were in company, your dignity much too big to admit that you were in love.”
“Don’t, Christine—don’t!” he murmured, the breath of a soundless sob escaping him in a broken exhalation. “If only we had had them—those holidays we meant to have!”
“We did, dear,” she pursued. “We did have them. They’re all there—among our dreams. Look at them and you will see that they are true. The memory of them isn’t spoilt by anything that was not just right. Can’t you call them up again—the holidays we used to promise ourselves for the days when you were successful? Can’t you see them? Can’t you see that lovely time in Italy—the big blue lake, with the yellow houses and the red roofs close under the mountains and fairy islands in the middle? Can’t you see Venice and the black gondola in which we sat, urged forward like a living thing over the still water in which the palaces were reflected? Can’t you call back that wonderful night of silent peacefulness when, arms around each other, we leaned out over our balcony and listened to the gondoliers singing to each other under the stars? Don’t you remember the bridge in Florence where you stopped and said: ‘This is where Dante met Beatrice’—and we looked into each other’seyes and knew that we, too, were a Dante and Beatrice, born for each other’s love? Don’t you remember, dear? Can’t you see them, all those wonderful years together, when you and I were young?”
“Christine, Christine!” he murmured. “If only they were true!”
“They are true, dear—they are true,” she asserted. “They are the truest things we have—the dreams of our souls which they will dream again and again long after we have no body. And not only holidays—our life together had work in it, too, didn’t it, dear?—hard and successful work. Do you remember the big case which made you famous?”
He nodded, a smile of genuine reminiscence on his face.
“The Pembroke case?”
“Yes, dear,” she continued, “the Pembroke case. Do you remember how hard you worked then?”
“By Jove, I do!” he agreed, with an emphatic little laugh. “I never worked so hard in my life!”
“Do you remember how I used to sit by the fire here at night, not daring to make the slightest sound, while you worked at your desk, going through all those masses and masses of papers in readiness for the next day of the trial? Do you remember how sometimes you would look up, not saying a word, but just assuring yourself that I was still there and going on with your work all the fresher because you saw me? Do you remember when at last, in the small hours, you finished for the night, you would come across and kiss me, oh, so quietly, and lay your head against me for comfort because you were so tired!”
He did not answer. His eyes stared into the fire, his lips thinned in a tight pressure against each other, as the mental picture of the fact came up in conflict with this ideality. They had been terrible, those nights of solitary work.
She continued, undeterred.
“And then, on the last day of the trial, when you had made that great speech—the first big speech of your career—and got your verdict, the night when all the newspapers were full of your triumph, do you remember your home-coming, dear?”
“By Heaven, I do!” he interrupted, with a sudden outburst of bitterness. “I came home and looked around me—and wished that I were dead in the hopeless emptiness of it all!”
“No, dear, no!” she corrected him. “You came home and found me waiting for you in my prettiest dress and we had dinner together, just you and I alone, because the moment was so big that we couldn’t possibly share it with any one else. Do you remember how solemn we tried to be, you and I—you looking so dignified in your evening clothes and I just as dainty as I could be? And then suddenly you jumped up like a schoolboy and darted round the table to kiss me—and we kissed and laughed at ourselves, and kissed and laughed again, every time the servants went out of the room—a couple of happy children. And I loved you so much because you were so very clever and yet could be such a boy. And then we got solemn again as the bigness of it all came over us—real, real success at last! The paths of all the world seemed open to us, didn’t they, dear? And we drank to it, success and love! And then, quite close and looking into my eyes, you said the loveliest thing of all the lovely things you ever said to me—you said that your great success, the one success that really mattered to you, was that you had won my love, my real, real love that bound my soul to yours for ever. Oh, Harry, I would have died for you that night!”
She ceased and he was silent. The might-have-been came up before him with intolerable vividness. If one could but begin over again!
“And now,” she gently moved the hand that all this time had lain in his as they crouched close together over the fire, “and now here we are—all the years of hardwork, so successful that we need not worry any more, behind us—nothing really important to do except to sit hand in hand and dream over the happy past, an old Darby and Joan who have lived their lives——”
He jumped to his feet.
“Christine! Christine!” he cried. “Let us make it true! Let us forget—forget all the bad dream—go on again together just as if what you said were true!”
She looked up at him, a strange and awful fear coming into her eyes, the face that had gained colour going ashen once more.
“Oh, Harry!” she said, in a tone of infinite reproach. “You’ve broken it! You’ve let go my hand!”
He ignored this infantile remark, went straight to his point in the brutally over-riding manner characteristic of him.
“Let us forget it, Christine, forget that you ever went away from me. I’ll never remind you of it. We won’t argue past responsibilities. We’ll start afresh. Christine, I’m a lonely old man—I want you. I want you to sit by the fire with me, to talk over, if you like, the might-have-beens that we threw away, I as much as you. I want you, anyway. I can’t bear loneliness any more—not now, after you have come back to me!”
She rose to her feet also, shivering, her eyes closing, biting at her lower lip as though in suppressed pain. She shook her head.
“No, Harry, not now. I—I must go away now, go back.”
She turned and moved, with a curious detachment from him that reminded him somewhat of a sleep-walker, toward the door.
He jumped in front of her.
“You shall not go, Christine! You have come back—and you shall not go again!”
She opened anguished eyes at him.
“Harry,” she said in a tone of profound melancholy, “you know you cannot keep me like that. Rememberthe last time you tried to hold me caged behind a closed door!”
He did remember—the day when, disapproving of some intended excursion, he had, in a cold passion, turned the key upon her—the day he had come back to find a broken lock and curt note. He had learned his lesson. He stood aside from her path, entreated instead of dictating.
“Stay with me, Christine! Stay with me!”
She shook her head.
“I cannot,” she said. “I must go back. It was only for one little hour I came. We have had it, Harry, and I must go.”
“But you will return? I shall see you again?”
She smiled a wan smile at him.
“Who knows, Harry?”
“Where are you going? Where do you live?”
“Please, Harry!—ask no questions. Let me go.”
There was a dignity about her which silenced him. He opened the door for her and they went out into the hall. In a dazed preoccupation, he went up to the outer door and opened it to the night. Then he turned and perceived her coatless condition.
“Good Heavens, Christine, you can’t go out like that! Wait a minute. I’ll lend you my fur coat. It’s better than nothing.”
He darted into the adjoining clothes-lobby, returned with the garment. The hall was empty; the door still open. She had gone.
He ran out and down the drive after her, crying her name: “Christine! Christine!” There was no response, neither sound nor sign of her. She had vanished.
Bitterly disappointed, he returned to the house, closed the door behind him. As he went into the clothes-lobby to replace the unneeded coat he was startled by the telephone bell.
He hastened to the instrument, picked up the receiver.
“Hallo!—Yes—Yes—what is it? Who are you?—the police?” He repeated the last word in a tone of bewilderment, listened.
“Yes,” he replied, “Yes—Mrs. Christine Arkwright—yes—that is my wife—yes——”
The silence of the empty hall seemed to envelop him as he listened. He interjected an impatient exclamation.
“Yes!—you found a letter and traced me—yes!—Go on!—What is it all about?”
He frowned, contorted his face as though the distant voice was not clearly audible.
“What?—what do you say?—died suddenly?—I don’t understand.—Where was this?”
He nodded as though now receiving more intelligible information.
“No—I don’t recognize the address at all! What sort of place is it?—oh, a second-rate boarding house. Well, I think there must be some mistake—what?”
He listened again.
“No,” he persisted categorically, “I say I think there must be some mistake. You say that a Mrs. Christine Arkwright died suddenly in a second-rate boarding-house—at that address I don’t know—and you’ve traced me out—I quite understand all that. But I say I have good reason to think there is a mistake somewhere—it couldn’t be—— What?”
He smiled with a grim superiority as he listened.
“What?—You say there’s no doubt of the identity?”
His brows puckered suddenly in the frown with which he prepared the annihilation of a stupid and stubbornly insistent witness.
“Now, pay attention, my friend!—When did this event occur?” He asked the question in the tone of one confident of establishing an impossibility by a counter fact. There was a moment of pause—and then his expression changed. “To-night?—At eleven o’clock?”
The clock in the study struck, discreetly, twelve.