I would wager--her aunt. Indeed, our rooms connected by a door, always
locked and without a key, of course. By a sudden impulse I took out my
bunch of keys. Fortune favored me; an old key, that of my room at
College, not only fitted perfectly, but opened it as softly as one
could wish, and the door itself never creaked. Locking it again, I went
into Amy's room through the hall. A low light was burning. I looked
about anxiously. Would she find the necessary means at hand without
arousing the household? It must be. Suicide must be quite apparent, and
the instrument must be suggested by its presence, without any search.
Among the trinkets in the large tray on her bureau, lay a tiny dagger
with a sheath. I remembered the day Hilyard gave it to her. The rainy
day when we were all looking over his Eastern curiosities, and she had
admired it, and he had insisted on her accepting it. The handle was of
carved jade, representing a lizard whose eyes were superb rubies, and a
band of uncut rubies ran around the place where the little curved blade
began. Ah! that was it! The very stones made one dream of drops of
blood. I laid it carelessly on the bureau, at the edge of the tray. If
she noticed its displacement, she would think the maid had been looking
at it, and the very fact of her picking it up and laying it among her
other trinkets would bring it to her thoughts when she awoke, with mind
set on death. _His_ poison, _his_ dagger--what fitness! Heaven itself
was helping me, and approving my ridding earth of this Lamia whose blood
ran evil.
When I gave Amy the letter, she took it languidly, saying she would read
it in her room; she was going to bed; the wine had made her drowsy; and
the others, too, declaring themselves worn with the great heat of the
day, we bade each other good-night, and the house was soon silent.
I undressed on going to my room, since, in case of certain events, it
would be to my interest to appear to have just risen from bed, and I
even lay down, wrapped in my dressing-gown, and put out my light. I
almost wondered that I felt no greater resentment and rage at Hilyard,
yet my sense of justice precluded it. As well blame the tree around
which the poison vine creeps and clings. I looked deeper than would the
world, which doubtless, judging from the surface, would have condemned
him rather than her, had all been known. She of the Madonna face and the
angel smile, anything but wronged? Never! The world would have acquitted
her triumphantly had she committed all the sins of the Borgias. For
myself, alas! I had heard her own lips condemn her, when, led by wanton
recklessness, or the occult sense of sympathy, she had talked to her
cousin this afternoon. Hilyard? Yes, it had chanced to be Hilyard, but
she, and not he, was most to blame. Hers was not a sin wept over and
expiated by remorse and tears; it was the soul, the essence of being,
that was corrupt to the very core in her. Had madness seized me when I
listened? I know not. I know I lay calmly and quietly, certain only
that it was well she was to die, certain that, if this failed, she must
die in another way before night came again, pitying neither her nor
myself in the apathy which held me, believing myself only the instrument
of some mighty power which was directing me, and against whose will I
could not rebel, if I wished.
For some time I could hear my betrothed moving about in her room; then
all was quiet, and she had doubtless lain down to sleep. By the
moonlight that filled my room I consulted my watch after a little while,
feeling that I had lost all sense of time, and found that it was half
past twelve, and that we had been upstairs over an hour. I concluded it
would hardly be safe to open the door yet; she might not be asleep. For
another half hour I lay patiently waiting. My mind was not excited, and
I reviewed rather the trifling events of my few hours in the city than
what had transpired since.
At last I rose, and in the dead quiet I moved softly to the connecting
door. I knew that it was concealed in Amy's room by a heavy portière,
and as it opened on my side, I had only to hide myself behind the
curtain's folds--as once before on that previous day, alas!--and,
unguessed by her, watch her at my ease.
The key moved gently in the lock; the lock yielded; a moment more and I
had pulled a tiny fold of the curtain aside, and commanded a full view
of the silent room. It was flooded with moonlight, and as light as day.
The bed was curtained, after the English fashion, but I fancied I could
hear a slight rustle of the coverings, as though one were roused, and
stirring restlessly. So light was the room that I could discern the
articles on the bureau and dressing-table. A branch of a great elm,
which grew at the side of the house, stretched across one window, and
its leaves, dancing in the night-breeze, made an ever-changing pattern
in shadow on the carpet. Did ever accepted lover keep such a tryst as
mine before? And she, just waking from her first sleep behind the
delicate white curtains of that bed, her tryst was with death, not with
love.
From the grove back of the house came a whip-poor-will's plaintive song,
pulsing in a tide of melody on the moonlit air. Was it a moan from the
bed, half-coherent and hopeless in cadence? Heaven grant that she waken
no one until it is too late, I thought fervently. I heard her step from
the bed. Once I would have hidden my eyes as devoutly as the pagan
blinded himself lest he should see Artemis, on whom it was desecration
to look, but now I hesitated no more to gaze on her than on any other
beautiful hateful thing which I should crush. Her loveliness stirred
neither my senses nor my compassion; both were forever dead, I knew, to
woman. Full in the stream of moonlight she stood, the soft, white folds
of her nightdress enveloping her from the throat to the small feet they
half hid. Her eyes were wide open, she was awake.
She remained for some moments by the window, meditating, apparently. She
talked to herself rapidly and in low undertones. What would I have given
to be able to hear all she thus said! Her expression was one of deep
mental agony, and I began to feel a growing confidence. How can words
express the hideousness of the change of countenance, the indescribable
horror and distress of a creature that is being pressed closer and
closer toward a yawning gulf of blackness from which there is no escape?
How relate the outward signs of an inward terror at which we can but
vaguely guess? Would that I could have penetrated to the depths of that
soul for one instant to realize completely the bitterness of the dregs
it was draining! She advanced to the middle of the room; she stretched
out both arms with a gesture of horror and despair. A long, convulsive
shudder shook her from head to foot. Her eyes filled with the unearthly
fear of one who sees walls closing in on her, of one bound, who sees
flames creeping closer and closer. In one instant I could see her pass
the line dividing mere mental anguish from insanity; the unmistakable
light of madness shone in her glance. With a cry of delight she seized
the little dagger. She was rushing down the corridor like the wind.
Should I follow her? I hesitated a moment. I heard a long, low cry of
mental agony; all the sounds of a house aroused from slumber by some
dreadful calamity.
Had she gone to Hilyard's room, to die on his threshold? It was silent
once more, except for the exclamations from the different bed-chambers,
and the hurrying sounds of footsteps down the corridor. Then I, too,
following the rest of the household, entered the room of death. Amy sat
curled up on the side of the bed, laughing like a pleased child at the
red stream that trickled from Hilyard's breast among the light bed
coverings, and dripped slowly to the floor.
* * * * *
Although I am never gay any more, I am not unhappy, for I am more than
satisfied with the effect of Hilyard's African drug. It is true that it
did not fulfill with accuracy all that he claimed for it; perhaps I gave
an overdose, or too little. If that is the case, he suffered for not
having been more exact. He should have mentioned, in telling his little
story, the amount necessary. However, as I say, I have no reason to find
fault with its results in this case.
In looking over the effects of the deceased for Mrs. Mershon, I
concluded that I should probably meet with no occasion to use the little
glass phial again, and as the drug seemed to be rather uncertain in its
ultimate effect, I decided, after some reflection, to throw it away, and
accordingly I emptied it out of the laboratory window on the flower-bed
beneath. I half expected to see the rose-bushes wither under it, but it
only shone slimily on the leaves for a while, and then was washed off by
a timely shower.
My friends have not tormented me with condolences, for as one of them
wrote me, the grief that had befallen me was beyond the reach of human
consolation. There are few indeed who lose a friend by death, and a
betrothed wife by madness, in one terrible night. My fidelity, it is
said, is most pathetic, to her who is hopelessly lost to me, for though
years have passed by, I am still so devoted to her memory, that no other
woman has claimed a moment of my attention. And my sister who is rather
sentimental in her expressions, declares that the love I had for Amy
drained my nature dry. I think she is possibly right.
AN EVENING WITH CALLENDER.
The room was filled with a blue haze of tobacco smoke, and I had made
all of it, for Callender, it seemed to me, had foresworn most of his old
habits. He used not once to lie back languidly in a lounging-chair,
neither smoking, nor talking, nor drinking punch, when a chum came to
see him. Indeed, after the first effervescence of our meeting, natural
after a separation of four years, had subsided, I found such a different
Tom Callender from the one who had wrung my hand in parting on the deck
of the _Marius_, that I had indulged in sundry speculations, and I
studied him attentively beneath half-closed lids, as I apparently
watched the white rings from my cigar melt into the air.
Where, precisely, was the change? It was hard to say. The long, thin
figure was nerveless in its poses; the slender brown hand that had had
a characteristic vigor, lying listlessly open on the arm of his chair,
no longer looked capable of a tense, muscular grasp of life; the
slightly elongated oval of the face, with its complexion and hair like
the Japanese, was scarcely more hollowed or lined than before, but it
had lost that expression of expectation, which is one of the distinctive
marks of youth in the face. He had been politely attentive to my
experiences in Rio Janeiro, with which I have no doubt I bored him
unutterably, but when I asked about old friends, or social life, he
lapsed into the indifference of the man for whom such things no longer
exist: reminiscence did not interest him. I asked him about the plays
now on at the leading theatres--he had not seen them; about the new
prima donna--he had not heard her. Finally I broke a long silence by
picking up a book from the table at my side. "Worth reading?" I asked,
nibbling at it here and there. (It was a novel, with "Thirty-fifth
thousand" in larger letters than the title on the top of its yellow
cover.) As I spoke, a peculiar name, the name of a character on the leaf
I was just turning, brought suddenly to my mind one of the few women I
had known who bore it.
"By the way, Callender," I said animatedly, striking down the page that
had recalled her with my finger, "What has become of your little
blue-stocking friend? Don't you know--her book was just out when I
sailed,--'On Mount Latmos,'--'On Latmos Top,'--what was it?"
A dark flush burnt its way up to the black, straight hair.
"She is--dead," Callender replied, with a hopeless pause before the
hopeless word.
"Dead!" I echoed, unable to associate the idea of death with the
incarnation of life that I remembered.
Callender did not reply. He rose, with the slight limp so familiar to me
in the past, but which I noticed now as if I had never seen it before,
and went to a desk at the far end of the spacious room. I smoked on
meditatively. It was odd, I thought, that chance had guided me straight
as an arrow, to the cause of the change in my friend. One might have
known, though, that he, the misogynist of our class, would have come to
grief, sooner or later, over a woman. They always end by that.
I heard him unlocking a drawer, turning over some papers, and presently
he limped back to his chair, bringing a heavy envelope. He took from it
a photograph, which he gave to me in silence. Yes, that was she, yet not
the same--oh! not the same--as when I had seen her the few times four
years ago. These solemn eyes were looking into the eyes of death, and
the face, frightfully emaciated, yet so young and brave, sunk in the
rich masses of hair. It was too pitiful.
Callender had taken a package of manuscript from the envelope; the long
supple fingers were busy among the leaves, and he bent his head to see
the numbered pages. At last, having arranged them in order, he leaned
back again in his chair, holding the papers tenderly in his hand. There
was nothing of the _poseur_ in Callender; his childlike simplicity of
manner invested him with a touching dignity even though he owned himself
vanquished, where another man would have faced life more bravely, nor
have held it entirely worthless because of one narrow grave which shut
forever from the light a woman who had never loved him.
"I think you would like to read this," he said at length. "And I would
like to have you. To her, it cannot matter. I wanted to marry her,
toward the end, so I could take care of her.--She was poor, you
know--but she would not consent. She left me this, without any message.
I knew her so well, she thought it would be easier for me to forget
her; but now I shall never forget her."
He gave me the little package of leaves, whose rough edges showed that
they had been hurriedly cut from a binding, and then he fell again into
his old lethargic attitude. I am not an imaginative man, but a faint
odor from the paper brought like a flash to my mind the brilliant,
mutinous face, radiant with color and life, that I had seen last across
a sea of white shoulders and black coats at a reception a few weeks
before I went to South America. The writing was the hurried, illegible
hand of an author. I thought grimly that I had probably chanced upon a
much weakened and Americanized Marie Bashkirtseff, for though I had only
been home a few weeks, it goes without saying that I had read a part at
least of the ill-fated young Russian's dairy. Yet in the presence of the
grief-stricken face, outlined against the dark leather chair-back, I
felt a pang of shame at a thought bordering on levity. There was indeed
one likeness: both were the unexpurgated records of hearts laid
ruthlessly bare; both were instinct with life: in every line one could
feel the warm blood throbbing.
A few of the pages of this journal, which I copy word for word from the
manuscript lying before me, I give the reader. Call the dead writer an
egotist, if you will: wonder at Callender's love for this self-centred
nature; I think she was an artist, and as an artist, her experience is
of value to art.
"_December_--18--.
"I have just torn out some pages written a year or so ago. A diary of
the introspective type is doubtless a pandering to egotism, but I have
always detested that affectation which ignores the fact that each person
is to him or herself the most interesting soul--yes, and body--in the
universe, and now there is nothing of such infinite importance to me as
this. I fear I shall never write again. All thought or plan, in prose
or verse, seems dead in me: broken images and pictures that are wildly
disconnected float through my tired mind. I have driven myself all day.
I have been seated at my desk, with my pen in my hand, looking blankly
at the paper. No words, no words! Just before my first book went to
press, I overworked. I was in a fever; poems, similes, ran through my
excited hours. I could not write fast enough. In that mental debauch I
believe that I squandered the energy of years, and now I can conceive no
more. If I could only sleep, perhaps I could write. Oh! long, long
nights, crowded with the fearful acceleration of trival thoughts crushed
one upon another, crowding so fast. 'My God,' I pray, 'Let me sleep,
only sleep,' and conquered by this abject need, this weariness
unutterable, I am fain to believe that this gift, common to the brute
and slave, is better than anything my mind can gain for me, and there
is nothing so entirely desirable in all the world as a few hours'
oblivion.
What a dream came to me this Autumn! The doctor had given me an opiate.
At first it had no effect. I tossed as restlessly as before on my hard
bed, sighing vainly for the sleep that refused to come. The noises in
the street vexed me. The light from an opposite window disturbed my
tired eyes. At last, I slept. Oh! the glow, the radiance unspeakable of
that dream! I was in a long, low room. A fire leaped on the hearth, as
though it bore a charmed life. Upon the floor was laid a crimson carpet.
There were great piles of crimson mattresses and cushions about the
room, the ceiling was covered with a canopy of red silk, drawn to a
centre, whence depended a lantern, filling the room with a soft rosy
twilight. The mantel was a bank of blood-red roses, and they also
bloomed and died a fragant death in great bowls set here and there about
the floor. And in the centre of this glowing, amorous room was a great
couch of red cushions, and I saw myself there, in the scented warmth,
one elbow plunged in the cushions, with a certain expectation in my
face. It was very quiet. Far down an echoing, distant corridor I heard
footsteps, and I smiled and pushed the roses about with my foot, for I
was waiting, and I knew that soft foot-fall drawing nearer, nearer. My
heart filled the silence with its beating. I looked about the room. Was
it ready? Yes, all was ready. The very flowers were waiting to be
crushed by his careless feet. The fire had died to a steady ardent glow.
How close the steps were drawing! A moment more--
I opened my eyes suddenly. I heard a door shut loudly, the sounds of
boots and clothing flung hurriedly down came through the thin partition,
and I knew that the lodger in the next room had tramped heavily up the
stairs, and was hastening to throw his clumsy body on the bed.
Elsie was breathing softly by my side, and my incredulous, disappointed
eyes saw only the reflection on the ceiling, like two great tears of
light, and I slept no more until the morning.
I read this, and it sounds coherent. Perhaps I have been needlessly
alarmed, perhaps the fear that is so terrible that I have not written it
lest it seems to grow real, is only a foolish fear. I must write, I must
make myself a name. To bring him that, in lieu of dower, would be
something; but poor, unknown, and of an obscure birth.--Will I not have
earned a short lease of happiness, if I achieve fame for his sake?
I will barter all for one week,--no, one day--of happiness. I do not
wish to grow old, to outlive my illusions. Only a short respite from
cares and sorrow, a brief time of flowers, and music, and love, and
laughter, and ecstatic tears, and intense emotion. I can so well
understand the slave in the glorious "_Un nuit de Cléopatre_," who
resolved a life-time into twelve hours, and having no more left to
desire, drank death as calmly as it were a draught of wine.
_January_, 9, 18--.
"Elsie, my poor little sister, is ill. Only a childish ailment, but I
have not written for three days, and she has lain, feeble and languid,
in my arms, and I have told her stories. We have moved again, and here,
thank God! the furniture, and the carpets and the paper do not swear at
each other so violently. I say, thank God! with due reverence. I am
truly and devoutly grateful for the release from that sense of unrest
caused by the twisted red and green arabesques on the floor. Here all is
sombre. The walls are a dull shade, the carpet neutral, the furniture
the faded brocatelle dedicate to boarding-houses; but it is not so bad.
The golden light lies along the floor, and is reflected on my 'Birth of
Venus' on the wall. Above my desk is a small shelf of my best-loved
books,--loved now; perhaps I shall destroy them next year, having
absorbed all their nutriment, even as now, 'I burn all I used to
worship. I worship all I used to burn.' Under the bookrack is a copy of
Severn's last sketch of Keats, the vanquished, dying head of the slain
poet, more brutally killed than the world counts. The eyes are closed
and sunken; the mouth, once so prone to kiss, droops pitifully at the
corners; the beautiful temples are hollow. Underneath I have written the
words of de Vigny, the words as true as death, if as bitter: 'Hope is
the greatest of all our follies.' I need no other curb to my mad dreams
than this.
"It has been cold, so cold to-day. I left Elsie asleep, and went to the
office of the ---- Magazine with an article I wrote a month or so ago.
The truth is, Elsie should have a doctor, and I have no money to pay
him. I was almost sure Mr. ---- would take this. He was out, and I
waited a long time in vain, and finally walked back in the wind and
blowing dust, chilled to the heart. I wished to write in the afternoon,
but I was so beaten with the weather that I threw myself on the bed by
Elsie to try to collect my thoughts. It was no use. I found my eyes and
mind wandering vaguely about the room. I was staring at the paper frieze
of garlanded roses, and the ugly, dingy paper below it of a hideous
lilac. What fiend ever suggested to my landlady the combination of
crimson roses and purplish paper? How I hate my environments! Poverty
and sybaritism go as ill together as roses and purple paper, but I have
always been too much given up to the gratification of the eyes and of
the senses. How well I remember in my first girlhood, how I used to fill
bowls with roses, lilacs and heliotrope, in the country June, and
putting beneath my cheek a little pillow, whose crimson silk gave me
delight, shut my eyes in my rough, unfinished little room, and the vales
of Persia and the scented glades of the tropics were mine to wander
through. Yes, a dreamer's Paradise, for I was only sixteen then, and
untroubled by any thoughts of Love; yet sometimes Its shadow would enter
and vaguely perplex me, a strange shape, waiting always beyond, in the
midst of my glowing gardens, and I sighed with a prescient pain. How
have I known Love since those days? As yet it has brought me but two
things--Sorrow and Expectation. In that fragmentary love-time that was
mine, I well remember one evening after he left me, that I threw myself
on the floor, and kissing the place where his dear foot had been set, I
prayed, still prostrate, the prayer I have so often prayed since. I
begged of God to let me barter for seven perfect days of love, all the
years that He had, perhaps, allotted to me. But my hot lips plead in
vain against the dusty floor, and it was to be that instead; he was to
leave me while love was still incomplete. But I know we shall meet
again, and I wait. He loved me, and does not that make waiting easy?
"My book _must_, it _shall_ succeed. It shall wipe out the stain on my
birth, it shall be enough to the world that I am what I am. To-night I
shall write half the night. No, there is Elsie. To-morrow, then, all
day. I shall not move from the desk. Oh! I have pierced my heart, to
write with its blood. It is an ink that ought to survive through the
centuries. Yet if it achieve my purpose for me, I care not if it is
forgotten in ten years.
"_February_ 12, 18--.
"I have seen him to-day, the only man I have ever loved. He loves me no
more. It is ended. What did _I_ say? I do not remember. I knew it all,
the moment he entered the room. When he went, I said: 'We shall never
meet again, I think. Kiss me on the lips once, as in the old days.'
"He looked down at me curiously. He hesitated a moment--then he bent and
kissed my mouth. The room whirled about me. Strange sounds were in my
ears; for one moment he loved me again. I threw myself in a chair, and
buried my face in my hands. I cried out to God in my desperate misery.
It was over, and he was gone--he who begged once for a kiss, as a slave
might beg for bread!
"And now in all this world are but two good things left me, my Art and
little Elsie. Oh! my book, I clung to it in that bitter moment, as the
work which should save my reason to live for the child."
"_February_ 18, 18--