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 layquiet, 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 glanceof 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.
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 thatrest 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 hadpulled 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 servantthat 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 youbeingonly 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 rapiditybeen 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 determinationhe 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 thegirl 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 thissecondary 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 towardJenny, 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 determinedeffort 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 falseto 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, andhe 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 coöperation 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-colored 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, andif 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 ofher 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 thatMiss 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 trimmedthe 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 shestirred 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 youplease,” 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 onher 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 insteadof 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.
“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 interruptedbrusquely, “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 heresilent 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. Shemay 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 bedoing 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 evensuspect 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 toallow 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. Theyare 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 thetremendousness 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 beenput 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 thelife 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 patriotmight 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 slightneglect 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 wentthrough 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 thatpersonal 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 speakto 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 theafternoon 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.