The early winter eve was falling drearily when Dr. Anthony went out of
the room, and left Oran Delaney alone, watching the dark shadows that
already began to creep about the corners--fantastic shadows cast by the
leaping blue and yellow flames of the fire.
He lay still and watched the eerie darkness closing in with strange
feelings. Just so was his life ebbing to a close, just so the shadows
of eternity were falling around him. Life’s brief day was almost
ended. It seemed to him that already he felt the chill of the grave in
which he would soon be lying.
“When I am dead she will come back,” he said to himself. “She will be
here again in her old home, with all the shadows lifted from her, and
she will be happy. Poor little wronged Aline! I should like to see her
just once more to ask her to forgive me for my fault. To the dying all
things are forgiven.”
He closed his eyes and lay thinking of the time when he had first met
her, a lovely, volatile creature, who half vexed and half amused him.
He did not dream then that she would be his fate. Now memory went back
and recalled her to his mind as the fairest vision that ever blessed
man’s eyes.
He hardly knew how love had come to him first. He could recall the
time when he had been most angry with her, when he would have liked,
above all things, to give her a hard shaking for her petulance, her
unreasonableness, her childishness. He thought it must have been in
those days when she lay ill and unconscious, and he had hung above her
in an agony of fear lest she should die there away from all who loved
her and grieved for her. He had fancied that the blue eyes dwelt upon
him wistfully, and followed him even in the wildness of delirium with a
strange half recognition. Then in the long, slow days of convalescence,
when she was helpless as a child, the sweet, pale, reproachful face had
crept into his heart. When in her anger she would tell him that she
would stay at Delaney House and die there before she would take the
cruel oath required of her, he was conscious that his heart had beat
half gladly at the thought of her staying beneath the same roof with
him and his misery. But he put the thought away from him as selfish,
and tried to be glad when she broke down at last, and pledged herself
to the silence he required of her.
That night when she went back to the cottage he had spent in a
miserable vigil watching her window with haggard, anxious eyes, yet
little dreaming of all that was transpiring behind it, or how bitterly
the girl would have to suffer for her silence. Man-like, he had not
thought of the world’s busy tongues, always wagging in cruel despite.
Well, it was all over now for Aline, and all over for him. He would not
believe that she was dead. He could not fancy those violet eyes closed
in the eternal sleep--those sweet lips silent forever! God would not be
so cruel now when life was opening so fairly for her, the shadows all
gone from her sky and her pathway bright with the sunshine. She would
come home and be happy after he was dead.
Deeper and deeper grew the shadows in the room. The fire sputtered and
sparkled, and a cinder fell noisily from the grate. He had become so
very nervous that even that little thing made him start and open his
eyes.
He opened them and glanced about the room. A cry broke from his lips.
He was not alone!
Just between him and the flickering firelight stood a girlish, graceful
figure with loosely falling hair, and a lovely white face turned
toward him. The blood around his heart seemed suddenly to turn to ice.
“What was it? A lying trick of the brain?
Yet I thought I saw her stand,
A shadow, there, at my feet.
High over the shadowing land.
* * * * *
The ghastly wraith of one that I know.”