On the following afternoon Irene found herself rowing on the river
with the lieutenant. She had declined his invitation to come, and had
immediately felt so exultant in the strength of mind which had enabled
her to withstand temptation that she had followed the refusal with an
acceptance.
The day was deliciously soft and balmy. A thin haze shut off the heat of
the sun, while a southerly breeze found somewhere a spicy and refreshing
odor, which with great generosity it diffused over the water. The river
moved tranquilly, and any one capable of being sentimental might well
find it hard to resist the influences of the afternoon.
The lieutenant was as ardently in love as it is possible for a man to be
who is at once a soldier and handsome, and indeed more than would have
been expected from a man who combined such causes of self-satisfaction.
The fact that Irene had a great deal of money, while he had none, gave
to his passion a hopelessness from his point of view which much
increased its fervor. He gazed at his companion with his great dark eyes
as she sat in the stern, his heavy eyebrows and well-developed mustache
preventing him from looking as silly as might otherwise have been the
case. Miss Gaspic was by no means insensible to the spell of the time
and of the companionship in which she found herself, but she was
determined above all things to be discreet.
"Arthur," she said, by way of keeping the talk in safe channels and also
of finding out what she wanted to know, "was search ever made for the
McHugh diamonds?"
"Search!" he repeated. "Everything short of pulling the house down has
been tried. Everybody in the family from the time they were lost has had
a hand at it."
"I do not see--" began Irene, when he interrupted brusquely.
"No," he said; "nobody sees. The solution of the riddle is probably so
simple that nobody will think of it. It will be hit upon by accident
some day. But, for the sake of goodness, let us talk of something else.
I always lose my temper when the McHugh diamonds are mentioned."
He relieved his impatience by a fierce spurt at the oars, which sent the
boat spinning through the water; then he shook himself as if to shake
off unpleasant thoughts, and once more allowed the current to take them
along. Irene looked at him with wistful eyes. She would have been so
glad to give him all her money if he would have it.
"You told me," she said at length, with a faint air of
self-consciousness, "that you wanted to say something to me."
The young lieutenant flushed, and looked between the trunks of the old
trees on the river-bank into the far distance. "I have," he responded.
"It is a piece of impertinence, because I have no right to say it to
you."
"You may say anything you wish to say," Irene answered, while a vague
apprehension took possession of her mind at something in his tone.
"Surely we have known each other long enough for that."
"Well," the other blurted out with an abruptness that showed the effort
that it cost him, "you should be married, Irene."
Irene felt like bursting into tears, but with truly feminine fortitude
she managed to smile instead.
"Am I getting so woefully old and faded, then, Arthur?" she asked.
His look of reproachful denial was sufficiently eloquent to need no
added word. "Of course not," he said; "but you should not be going on
toward the time when--"
"When I shall be," she concluded his sentence as he hesitated. "Then,
Arthur, why don't you ask me to marry you?"
The blood rushed into his face and ebbed away, leaving him as pale as
so sun-browned a fellow could well be. He set his teeth together over
a word which was strangled in its utterance, and Irene saw with secret
admiration the mighty grasp of his hands upon the oars. She could be
proud of his self-control so long as she was satisfied of the intensity
of his feelings, and she was almost as keenly thrilled by the adoring,
appealing look in his brown eyes as she would have been by a caress.
"Because," he said, "the McHughs have never yet been set down as
fortune-hunters, and I do not care to be the one to bring that reproach
upon the family."
"What a vilely selfish way of looking at it!" she cried.
"Very likely it seems so to a woman."
Irene flushed in her turn, and for fully two minutes there was no sound
save that of the water lapping softly against the boat. Then Miss Gaspic
spoke again.
"It is possible," she said, in a tone so cold that the poor lieutenant
dared not answer her, "that the fact that you are a man prevents you
from understanding how a woman feels who has thrown herself at a man's
head, as I have done, and been rejected. Take me back to the shore."
And he had not a word to answer.
V
To have proposed to a man, and been refused, is not a soothing
experience for any woman; and although the ground upon which Arthur had
based his rejection was one which Irene had before known to be the
obstacle between them, the refusal remained a stubborn fact to rankle in
her mind. All the evening she nursed her wounded feelings, and by the
time midnight brought her once more face to face with the ghost of the
major, her temper was in a state which nothing save the desire to shield
a lady could induce one to call by even so mild a word as uncertain.
The spirit appeared as usual, saluting, and tossing off bumpers from its
shadowy wine-glass, and it had swallowed at least a dozen cups before
Miss Gaspic condescended to indicate that she was aware of its presence.
"Why do you stand there drinking in that idiotic fashion?" she demanded,
with more asperity than politeness. "Once is quite enough for that sort
of thing."
"But I cannot speak until I have been spoken to," the ghost responded
apologetically, "and I have to continue drinking until I have been
requested to do something else."
"Drink, then, by all means," Irene replied coldly, turning to pick up a
book. "I only hope that so much wine will not go to your head."
"But it is sure to," the ghost said, in piteous tones; "and in all my
existence, even when I was only a man, I have never been overcome with
wine in the presence of a lady."
It continued to swallow the wraith of red wine while it spoke, and Irene
regarded it curiously.
"An inebriated ghost," she observed dispassionately, "is something which
it is so seldom given to mortal to see that it would be the greatest of
folly to neglect this opportunity of getting sight of that phenomenon."
"Please tell me to go away, or to sit down, or to do something," the
quondam major pleaded.
"Then tell me where the McHugh diamonds are," she said.
A look of desperate obstinacy came into the ghost's face, through which
could unpleasantly be seen the brass knobs of a tall secretary on the
opposite side of the room. For some moments the pair confronted each
other in silence, although the apparition continued its drinking. Irene
watched the figure with unrelenting countenance, and at length made the
curious discovery that it was standing upon tiptoe. In a moment more she
saw that it was really rising, and that its feet from time to time left
the carpet entirely. Her first thought was a fear that it was about
to float away and escape, but upon looking closer she came to the
conclusion that it was endeavoring to resist the tendency to rise into
the air. Watching more sharply, she perceived that while with its right
hand it raised its inexhaustible wine-cup, with its left it clung to
the back of a chair in an evident endeavor to keep itself down.
"You seem to be standing on tiptoe," she observed. "Were you looking for
anything?"
"No," the wraith responded, in evident confusion; "that is merely the
levitation consequent upon this constant imbibing."
Irene laughed contemptuously. "Do you mean," she demanded unfeelingly,
"that the sign of intoxication in a ghost is a tendency to rise into the
air?"
"It is considered more polite in our circle to use the term employed by
the occultists," the apparition answered somewhat sulkily. "We speak of
it as 'levitation.'"
"But I do not belong to your circle," Irene returned cheerfully, "and I
am not in sympathy with the occultists. Does it not occur to you," she
went on, "that it is worth while to take into consideration the fact
that in these progressive times you do not occupy the same place in
popular or even in scientific estimation which was yours formerly? You
are now merely an hallucination, you know, and there is no reason that
I should regard you with anything but contempt, as a mere symptom of
indigestion or of mental fatigue."
"But you can see that I am not an hallucination, can you not?" quavered
the poor ghost of the major, evidently becoming dreadfully discouraged.
"Oh, that is simply a delusion of the senses," Irene made answer in a
matter-of-fact way, which, even while she spoke, she felt to be basely
cruel. "Any physician would tell me so, and would write out a
prescription for me to prevent my seeing you again."
"But he could n't," the ghost said, with pathetic feebleness.
"You do not know the physicians of to-day," she replied, with a smile.
"But to drop that, what I wished to say was this: does it not seem to
you that this is a good opportunity to prove your reality by showing me
the hiding-place of the diamonds? I give you my word that I will report
the case to the Psychical Research Society, and you will then go on
record and have a permanent reputation which the incredulity of the age
cannot destroy."
The ghost was by this time in a state of intoxication which evidently
made it able only with the utmost difficulty to keep from sailing to the
ceiling. It clung to the back of a chair with a desperate clutch, while
its feet paddled hopelessly and helplessly in the air, in vain attempts
once more to get into touch with the floor.
"But the Psychical Research Society is not recognized in my circle," it
still objected.
"Very well," Irene exclaimed in exasperation; "do as you like! But what
will be the effect upon your reputation if you go floating helplessly
back to your circle in your present condition? Is levitation in the
presence of ladies considered respectable in this society of whose
opinion you think so much?"
"Oh, to think of it!" the spirit of the bygone major wailed with a
sudden shrillness of woe which made even Miss Gaspic's blood run cold.
"Oh, the disgrace of it! I will do anything you ask."
Irene sprang to her feet in sudden excitement.
"Will you show me--" she began; but the wavering voice of the ghost
interrupted her.
"You must lead me," it said. "Give me your hand. I shall float up to the
ceiling if I let go my hold upon this chair."
"Your hand--that is, I--I don't like the feeling of ghosts," Irene
replied. "Here, take hold of this."
She picked up a pearl paper-knife and extended it toward the spirit. The
ghost grasped it, and in this manner was led down the chamber, floating
and struggling upward like a bird. Irene was surprised at the amount of
force with which it pulled at the paper-knife, but she reflected that it
had really swallowed an enormous quantity of its ghostly stimulant. She
followed the directions of the waving hand that held the wine-glass,
and in this way they came to a corner of the room where the spirit made
signs that it wished to get nearer the floor. Irene pulled the figure
downward, until it crouched in the corner. It laid one transparent hand
upon a certain panel in the wainscoting.
"Search here," it said.
In the excitement of the moment Irene relaxed her hold upon the
paper-knife. Instantly the ghost floated upward like a balloon released
from its moorings, while the paper-knife dropped through its incorporeal
form to the floor.
"Good-by," Irene cried after it. "Thank you so much!"
And like a blurred and dissolving cloud above her head the intoxicated
ghost faded into nothingness.