It was dusk, and Anthony Dexter sat in the library. Through the day,
he had wearied himself to the point of exhaustion, but his phantom
pursuer had not tired. The veiled figure of Evelina had kept pace
easily with his quick, nervous stride. At the point on the river
road, where he had met her for the first time, she had, indeed,
seemed to go ahead of him and wait for him there.
Night brought no relief. By a singular fatality, he could see her in
darkness as plainly as in sunshine, and even when his eyes were
closed, she hovered persistently before him. Throughout his drugged
sleep she moved continuously; he never dreamed save of her.
In days gone by, he had been certain that he was the victim of an
hallucination, but now, he was not so sure. He would not have sworn
that the living Evelina was not eternally in his sight. Time and
time again he had darted forward quickly to catch her, but she
swiftly eluded him. "If," he thought, gritting his teeth, "I could
once get my hands upon her----"
His fists dosed tightly, then, by a supreme effort of will, he put
the maddening thought away. "I will not add murder to my sins," he
muttered; "no, by Heaven, I will not!"
By a whimsical change of his thought, he conceived himself dead and
in his coffin. Would Evelina pace ceaselessly before him then? When
he was in his grave, would she wait eternally at the foot of it, and
would those burning eyes pierce the shielding sod that parted them?
Life had not served to separate them--could he hope that Death would
prove potent where Life had failed?
Ralph came in, tired, having done his father's work for the day. The
room was wholly dark, but he paused upon the threshold, conscious
that some one was there.
"Alone, father?" he called, cheerily.
"No," returned Anthony Dexter, grimly.
"Who's here?" asked Ralph, stumbling into the room. "It's so dark, I
can't see."
Fumbling for a match, he lighted a wax candle which stood in an
antique candlestick on the library table. The face of his father
materialised suddenly out of the darkness, wearing an expression
which made Ralph uneasy.
"I thought," he said, troubled, "that some one was with you."
"Aren't you here?" asked Anthony Dexter, trying to make his voice
even.
"Oh," returned Ralph. "I see."
With the candle flickering uncertainly between them, the two men
faced each other. Sharp shadows lay on the floor and Anthony
Dexter's profile was silhouetted upon the opposite wall. He noted
that the figure of Evelina, pacing to and fro, cast no shadow. It
seemed strange.
In the endeavour to find some interesting subject upon which to talk,
Ralph chanced upon the fatal one. "Father," he began, "you know that
this morning we were speaking of Miss Evelina?"
The tone was inquiring, but there was no audible answer.
"Well," continued Ralph, "I saw her again to-day. And I saw her
face." He had forgotten that his father had seen it, also, and had
told him only yesterday.
Anthony Dexter almost leaped from his chair--toward the veiled figure
now approaching him. "Did--did she show you her face?" he asked with
difficulty.
"No. It was an accident. She often left the front door open for me
when I was attending--Araminta--and so, to-day, when I found it open,
I went in. She was asleep, on the couch in the parlour, and she wore
no veil."
At once, the phantom Evelina changed her tactics. Hitherto, she had
walked back and forth from side to side of his vision. Now she
advanced slowly toward him and as slowly retreated. Her face was no
longer averted; she walked backward cautiously, then advanced. From
behind her veil, he could feel her burning, accusing eyes.
"Father," said Ralph, "she is beautiful. She is the most beautiful
woman I have ever seen in all my life. Her face is as exquisite as
if chiselled in marble, and you never saw such eyes. And she wears
that veil all the time."
Anthony Dexter's cold fingers were forced to drum on the table with
apparent carelessness. Yes, he knew she was beautiful. He had not
forgotten it for an instant since she had thrown back her veil and
faced him. "Did--did she tell you why?" he asked.
"Yes," answered Ralph. "She told me why."
A sword, suspended by a single hair, seemed swaying uncertainly over
Anthony Dexter's head--a two-edged sword, sure to strike mercilessly
if it fell. Ralph's eyes were upon him, but not in contempt. God,
in His infinite pity, had made them kind.
"Father," said Ralph, again, "she would not tell the name of the man,
though I begged her to." Anthony Dexter's heart began to beat again,
slowly at first, then with a sudden and unbearable swiftness. The
blood thundered in his ears like the roar of a cataract. He could
hardly hear what Ralph was saying.
"It was in a laboratory," the boy continued, though the words were
almost lost. "She was there with the man she loved and whom she was
pledged to marry. He was trying a new experiment, and she was
watching. While he was leaning over the retort to put in another
chemical, she heard the mass seethe, and pushed him away, just in
time to save him.
"There was an explosion, and she was terribly burned. He was not
touched, mind you--she had saved him. They took her to the hospital,
and wrapped her in bandages. He went there only once. There was
another girl there, named Evelyn Grey, who was so badly burned that
every feature was destroyed. The two names became confused, and a
mistake was made. They told him she would be disfigured for life,
and so he went away."
The walls of the room swayed as though they were of fabric. The
floor undulated; his chair rocked dizzily. Out of the accusing
silence, Thorpe's words leaped to mock him:
_The honour of the spoken word still holds him. He asked her to
marry him and she consented . . . he was never released from his
promise . . . did not even ask for it. He slunk away like a
cur . . . sometimes I think there is no sin but shirking. . . I can
excuse a liar . . . I can pardon a thief . . . I can pity a
murderer . . . but a shirk, no_.
"Father," Ralph was saying, "you do not seem to understand. I
suppose it is difficult for you to comprehend such cowardice--you
have always done the square thing." The man winced, but the boy did
not see it.
"Try to think of a brute like that, Father, and be glad that our name
means 'right.' She saved him from terrible disfigurement if not from
death. Having instinctively thrown up her right arm, she got the
worst of it there, and on her shoulder. Her face was badly burned,
but not so deeply as to be scarred. She showed me her shoulder--it
is awful. I never had seen anything like it. She said her arm was
worse, but she did not show me that."
"He never knew?" asked Anthony Dexter, huskily. Ralph seemed to be
demanding something of him, and the veiled figure, steadily advancing
and retreating, demanded more still.
"No," answered Ralph, "he never knew. He went to the hospital only
once. He had told her that very day that he loved her for the
beautiful soul she had, and at the test, his love failed. He never
saw her again. He went away, and married, and he has a son. Think
of the son, Father, only think of the son! Suppose he knew it! How
could he ever bear a disgrace like that!"
"I do not know," muttered Anthony Dexter. His lips were cold and
stiff and he did not recognise his own voice.
"When she understood what had happened," Ralph continued, "and how he
had deserted her for ever, after taking his cowardly life from her as
a gift, her hair turned white. She has wonderful hair. Father--it's
heavy and white and dull--it does not shine. She wore the veil at
first because she had to, because her face was healing, and before it
had wholly healed she had become accustomed to the shelter of it.
Then, too, as she said, it kept people away from her--she could not
be tempted to love or trust again."
There was an interval of silence, though the very walls seemed to be
crying out: "Tell him! Tell him! Confess, and purge your guilty
soul!" The clock ticked loudly, the blood roared in his ears. His
hands were cold and almost lifeless; his body seemed paralysed, but
he heard, so acutely that it was agony.
"Miss Evelina said," resumed Ralph, "that she did not think he had
told his son. Do you know what I was thinking, Father, while she was
talking? I was thinking of you, and how you had always done the
square thing."
It seemed to Anthony Dexter that all the tortures of his laboratory
had been chemically concentrated and were being poured out upon his
head. "Our name means 'right,'" said the boy, proudly, and the man
writhed in his chair.
For a moment, the ghostly Evelina went to Ralph, her hands
outstretched in disapproval. Immediately she returned to her former
position, advancing, retreating, advancing, retreating, with the
regularity of the tide.
"I begged her," continued Ralph, "to tell me the man's name, but she
would not. He still lives, she said, he is happy and prosperous and
he has not suffered at all. For the honour of men, I want to punish
that brute. Father, do you know that when I think of a cur like
that, I believe I could rend him with my own hands?"
Anthony Dexter got to his feet unsteadily. The mists about him
cleared and the veiled figure whisked suddenly out of his sight. He
went up to Ralph as he might walk to the scaffold, but his head was
held high. All the anguish of his soul crystallised itself into one
passionate word:
"Strike!"
For an instant the boy faced him, unbelieving. Then he remembered
that his father had seen Miss Evelina's face, that he must have known
she was beautiful--and why she wore the veil. "Father!" he cried,
shrilly. "Oh, never you!"
Anthony Dexter looked into the eyes of his son until he could bear to
look no more. The veiled figure no longer stood between them, but
something else was there, infinitely more terrible. As he had
watched the beating of the dog's bared heart, the man watched the
boy's face. Incredulity, amazement, wonder, and fear resolved
themselves gradually into conviction. Then came contempt, so deep
and profound and permanent that from it there could never be appeal.
With all the strength of his young and knightly soul, Ralph despised
his father--and Anthony Dexter knew it.
"Father," whispered the boy, hoarsely, "it was never you! Tell me it
isn't true! Just a word, and I'll believe you! For the sake of our
manhood, Father, tell me it isn't true!"
Anthony Dexter's head drooped, his eyes lowered before his son's.
The cold sweat dripped from his face; his hands groped pitifully,
like those of a blind man, feeling his way in a strange place.
His hands fumbled helplessly toward Ralph's and the boy shrank back
as though from the touch of a snake. With a deep-drawn breath of
agony, the man flung himself, unseeing, out of the room. Ralph
reeled like a drunken man against his chair. He sank into it
helplessly and his head fell forward on the table, his shoulders
shaking with that awful grief which knows no tears.
"Father!" he breathed. "Father! Father!"
Upstairs, Anthony Dexter walked through the hall, followed, or
occasionally preceded, by the ghostly figure of Evelina. Her veil
was thrown back now, and seemed a part of the mist which surrounded
her. Sometimes he had told a patient that there was never a point
beyond which human endurance could not be made to go. He knew now
that he had lied.
Ralph's unspoken condemnation had hurt him cruelly. He could have
borne words, he thought, better than that look on his son's face.
For the first time, he realised how much he had cared for Ralph; how
much--God help him!--he cared for him still.
Yet above it all, dominant, compelling, was man's supreme
passion--that for his mate. As Evelina moved before him in her
unveiled beauty, his hungry soul leaped to meet hers. Now,
strangely, he loved her as he had loved her in the long ago, yet with
an added grace. There was an element in his love that had never been
there before--the mysterious bond which welds more firmly into one,
two who have suffered together.
He hungered for Ralph--for the strong young arm thrown about his
shoulders in friendly fashion, for the eager, boyish laugh, the
hearty word. He hungered for Evelina, radiant with a beauty no woman
had ever worn before. Far past the promise of her girlhood, the
noble, transfigured face, with its glory of lustreless white hair,
set his pulses to throbbing wildly. And subtly, unconsciously, but
not the less surely, he hungered for death.
Anthony Dexter had cherished no sentiment about the end of life; to
him it had seemed much the same as the stopping of a clock, and of as
little moment. He had failed to see why such a fuss was made about
the inevitable, though he had at times been scientifically interested
in the hysterical effect he had produced in a household by announcing
that within an hour or so a particular human clock might be expected
to stop. It had never occurred to him, either, that a man had not a
well-defined right to stop the clock of his own being whenever it
seemed desirable or expedient.
Now he thought of death as the final, beautiful solution of all
mundane problems. If he were dead, Ralph could not look at him with
contempt; the veiled--or unveiled--Evelina could not haunt him as she
had, remorselessly, for months. Yes, death was beautiful, and he
well knew how to make it sure.
By an incredibly swift transition, his pain passed into an exquisite
pleasure. The woman he loved was walking in the hall before him; the
son he loved was downstairs. What man could have more?
"For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave,
The black minute's at end,
And the elements' rage, the fiend voices that rave,
Shall dwindle, shall blend,
Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain,
Then a light, then thy breast--
Oh thou soul of my soul, I shall clasp thee again,
And with God be the rest!"
The wonderful words sang themselves over in his consciousness. He
smiled and the unveiled Evelina smiled back at him, with infinite
tenderness, infinite love. To-night he would sleep as he had not
slept before--in the sleep that knows no waking.
He had the tiny white tablets, plenty of them, but the fancy seized
him to taste this last bitterness to the full. He took a wine glass
from his chiffonier--those white, blunt fingers had never been more
steady than now. He lifted the vial on high and poured out the
laudanum, faltering no more than when he had guided the knife in an
operation that made him famous throughout the State.
"Evelina," he said, his voice curiously soft, "I pledge you now, in a
bond that cannot break!" Was it fancy, or did the violet eyes soften
with tears, even though the scarlet lips smiled?
He drank. The silken petals of the poppies, crushed into the peace
that passeth all understanding, began their gentle ministry. He
made his way to his bed, put out his candle, and lay down. The
Spirit of the Poppies stood before him--a woman with a face like
Evelina's, but her garments were scarlet, and Evelina always wore
black.
In the darkness, he could not distinguish clearly. "Evelina," he
called, aloud, "come! Come to me, and put your hand in mine!"
At once she seemed to answer him, wholly tender, wholly kind. Was he
dreaming, or did Evelina come and kneel beside him? He groped for
her hand, but it eluded him.
"Evelina," he said, again, "dear heart! Come! Forgive," he
breathed, drowsily. "Ah, only forgive!"
Then, as if by a miracle, her hand slipped into his and he felt his
head drawn tenderly to man's first and last resting place--a woman's
breast.
And so, after a little, Anthony Dexter slept. The Spirit of the
Poppies had claimed her own at last.