CHAPTER XVI.
A FORMER SOUL-MATE.
“But where can I go?” cried little Eva.
Her face was a picture of wistful joy when she was first told that the doctors considered her cured of her mental malady, and that she was free to leave the asylum whenever she chose.
She wept with relief, and murmured low some words of thanksgiving to God. Then her face clouded with perplexity as she cried:
“But where can I go for shelter, branded with a scandal, though innocent of any wrongdoing? I have no friends, no home.”
“You forget your rich father in New York,” suggested Doctor Merry, who had heard her story, and believed this would be her best refuge.
She shook her head.
“He was cruel to my mother, and he will never hear from me that she left him a daughter,” she said, with a little flash of spirit.
“Quite right, Miss Somerville,” said the superintendent, coming up to them where they lingered in the beautiful grounds talking, and he added, with his most genial smile:
“I shall be glad to make you one of the attendantshere, if you wish to stay and earn your own living.”
“I shall have to do that hereafter, so I accept your offer with thanks,” she replied instantly, in her relief at finding a home open to her, even though it was under the roof of a lunatic asylum.
But she had met warm hearts here, dear and true friends, and their kindness was a balm to her pain. The middle-aged superintendent was kind and fatherly, the woman physician sisterly, the two young men doctors frank and sociable, as well as all the attendants. No one passed her with cold looks, or burned her heart with cruel words. They did not seem to remember that she was under a cloud, her fair name stained by scandal. She would stay here and work among them as long as she lived.
“You may begin your new duties to-morrow. Come to me in my office early in the morning for assignment to a ward,” said Doctor St. Clair.
Then they all slipped away to their duties, and she walked alone among the beautiful flowers and trees of the wide grounds, her heart swelling with gratitude that she need not go away out into the cold world, where no one believed in her innocence, and no one loved her any more.
She could have gone down on her knees to thank the fatherly superintendent for letting her stay, only she was just a little bit frightened at his easy ways, so different from any she had been used to. She did not like for him to catch her hand and hold it sotight when he was talking to her, and look so deep into her eyes with admiration that made her blush.
She had noticed that he had the same way with others—always young and pretty ones—and only yesterday she had spoken to dashing Miss Blue about it.
“Don’t you think he is too familiar with us girls, catching our hands so tight and looking in our eyes that queer way?” naively.
Miss Blue laughed lightly.
“Oh, the doctor means no harm. He is just jolly and fatherly. He always has his little joke with me when I go in his office at night to make my report. Besides, if we were to resent his little cordialities we might lose our positions.”
“I see,” little Eva answered quickly, and now that she was engaged as an attendant, too, she thought:
“I would have thanked him more cordially, only I didn’t want him to catch my hand and squeeze it tight, and look at me as if he thought that I was very pretty! Somehow I don’t believe his wife would like it. She seems cold enough, especially to that Miss Blue that the doctor is always chaffing.”
She had wandered away by herself, out of sight and hearing of the poor lunatics disporting themselves in the sunshine, and now she sat down beneath a tree to rest, a lovely picture on which one man’s eyes rested in rapture, as if he, too, like the superintendent, thought her pretty.
He came slowly to her side.
“Do I intrude, Miss Somerville?”
She glanced up into the eyes of Doctor Rupert, deeply, darkly, beautifully blue, behind the glasses he habitually wore, and met a winning smile. Her cheeks dimpled and turned a warm pink as she faltered:
“Oh, no. Will you have a seat?”
He sat down on the bench at the farthest end, not to startle her, and held out a bunch of pansies.
“The gardener just gave them to me. Aren’t they lovely? Will you have them?”
Their hands touched as she accepted them, and a thrill of pleasure shook either heart. She had been thinking him handsome a long time, in spite of the glasses and the long curling hair down on his coat collar, that gave him rather an elderly air, though the eyes behind the glasses were quite young and merry.
“Why does it always seem to me as if I had met you before I came here? Where did you come from?”
“Ohio!” he replied, with a quickened heart throb.
“Then it must be only my fancy. I have certainly never been to Ohio, or anywhere else,” naively. “Yet the first moment we met, even when I was a little off in my head, you know, you did not seem like a stranger to me, but as if you somehow belonged to my past.”
“We have perhaps met in some former periods of existence, and you recognize me as a former soulmate. That is my theory. What is yours?”
Before she could reply a poor, melancholy-madwretch came up to them with the startling complaint:
“I have been dead a week, and they will not bury me! I went into the deadhouse and got into a coffin, but four men shook me out of it, and said it was a shocking misfit! Do you know where I can find a coffin for myself, doctor?”
One of the most gruesome of all the manias of the melancholy-mad patient is the fixed conviction of one’s death and impending burial.
Doctor Rupert had met with the hallucination before, but coming at this moment of his budding happiness, it struck him with a strange chill like an evil omen, as if the shadow of a grave stretched dark and forbidding between their hearts.
They turned to the poor lunatic, a pale young man whose mind had given way at college from overstudy, in a sort of dismay, and Doctor Rupert exclaimed with unusual impoliteness:
“Do go away, Alden, with your dismal croaking! You are not really dead, you know, but only in a trance, and presently you will come out of it, and thank your lucky stars that you were not buried alive.”
But the maniac tossed back the long hair from his pale brow dejectedly and protested firmly:
“You are mistaken. I am dead, and it is time to bury me! Martin is dead, also, and he was saying to me just now that it is not right for old Charles, that grinning darky over there in his red monkey suit, tobe playing the fiddle and dancing when there are so many of us dead and unburied. It is not the kind of music for a funeral. He ought to play the dead march.”
“Nonsense!” answered the young doctor; but Alden lingered, gabbling on vacantly:
“I have a note up my sleeve to slip to the directors when they come again, complaining of the superintendent for not having us buried when we are dead. He spends too much time flirting with Miss Blue and the others, and neglects us. I’ll bet you a dime the directors will make him squirm when they read my note. Want to see it?” cordially.
Doctor Rupert shook his head kindly. He had already seen several of these Round Robins gotten up by querulous patients and complaining of everybody and everything. The directors were always deluged with them when they met, and usually comforted the writers with tobacco.
“Now, I will tell you, Alden, why you and Martin have not gotten your caskets yet,” the young doctor said, concluding to humor his whim. “It is because you have not given your order, and the superintendent does not know what style you want. Take my advice, and go and ask him for the style book on undertaking, and you and Martin can make your own selections. Fashions in caskets have changed, you know.”
Alden listened attentively with his eyes cast down, and replied briskly:
“I shall choose a metallic casket, hermetically sealed, so that the rascally doctors cannot steal me out and cut up my head to find what was the matter with my brain!”
He was going away, but seeming for the first time to become aware of Eva’s presence, he gave her a shifty glance from the corner of his eye, saying earnestly:
“I heard you had got well and were going to leave Weston, little Eva. I wish I was in your place. If you see any of my relatives when you get out, please tell them I am dead, and that I died a most horrible death. I wish they would come to my funeral. Good-by,” and he put out his cold, clammy hand and pressed hers, sending a shudder through all her veins. He was so horribly realistic it seemed as if he were indeed a living corpse now stalking away in grim intent to seek the style book on undertaking.
“How pitiful!” she cried, looking up at Doctor Rupert with such pearly tears in her eyes that he longed to clasp her in his arms and kiss them away. She added almost bitterly:
“It is a cruel fate that dooms me to spend my life amid such sad surroundings.”
He answered gently:
“It is not likely you will stay here long. Like all the other pretty girls, you will be sure to marry soon and leave here to be the queen of a happy home.”
His voice trembled with emotion, his eyes were benton her with wistful tenderness, and little Eva blushed and dimpled exquisitely.
“Why do you think so?” she murmured softly, a smile chasing away her tears.
“You have a lover,” he answered frankly.
She was too ingenuous to deny it, but she said, with a stifled sigh:
“I do not know his name.”
“And yet you love him?”
Little Eva was all one rosy blush now, and she hung her head, faltering:
“How can one love a person one has never seen?”
“Because his full heart has spoken to you in his offerings of love, and yours has responded to the test. You are deeply interested in your unknown lover who has chosen so romantic a way to win your heart.”
“You are very confident that he has won my heart,” she pouted with pretty coquetry, avoiding his eyes and playing with the pansies on her breast.
“Is there any doubt of it?” he asked hoarsely, paling with sudden alarm lest he had been mistaken.
She was so dear and so lovely, and he had been so sure she was won—too sure, it seemed, for she answered again, half pettishly, as if in offense:
“How could a young girl love one that she had never seen?”
“I have known young people to fall in love from carrying on a correspondence without ever having met,” he replied eagerly.
“But they must surely have exchanged photographs—they must have known how they each looked,” she objected.
“No; they only saw each other’s beautiful souls through their letters.”
Did Eva have any suspicion of him? She suddenly flashed her dark eyes at him full of dawning mischief, and said lightly:
“I’m not ethereal enough to fall in love with just a soul, for they sometimes inhabit very plain bodies. If I ever love, it must be one who is very handsome and winning. Oh, I would give almost anything for one glimpse of my mysterious lover!”
“I still insist that you love him without seeing him. He would be a dangerous rival to any other lover who came to woo you in person,” he said.
“Are you so sure?” cried the girl, with delicious new-fledged coquetry that made his nerves thrill with ecstasy. Another laughing glance from her large, dark, flashing eyes almost made him fall at her feet in frank adoration.
She suspected his passion, and was coquettishly playing him off against her unknown lover.
Carried out of himself, encouraged by her fascinating mood, in another moment he would have gone to the length at least of confessing himself a rival to the unknown, had not a sudden interruption occurred.
“Doctor St. Clair would like to see you immediately,” said an attendant, coming up.
He did not like to disturb the handsome pair at their tête-à-tête beneath the tree in the soft May sunshine, but the superintendent’s orders were imperative.
As soon as Doctor St. Clair had seen the pair alone down in the grounds so close together on the bench, it occurred to him that he would like an immediate consultation with Doctor Rupert upon the case of a patient who had for several days been very ill.
So he sent an instant message to break up the too suggestive tête-à-tête.
“Excuse me,” Doctor Rupert said, rising, with a low bow to Eva. “Or will you walk back to the house with me?”
“I think I will remain out in the sunshine. It is my last day of freedom, you know. To-morrow I shall be imprisoned in the wards,” she answered, nodding at him as he walked away, with a smile of such subtle radiance it warmed his heart like wine.