When Harold Carnegie was finally married to Isabel Walters, Ernest
stopped away from the wedding, and would have nothing whatever to say
either to bride or bridegroom. He would leave his unnatural brother, he
said, solely and entirely to the punishment of his own guilty
conscience.
Still, he couldn't rest quiet in his father's house after Harold was
gone, so he took himself small rooms near the hospital, and there he
lived his lonely life entirely by himself, a solitary man, brooding
miserably over his own wrongs and Harold's treachery. There was only one
single woman in the world, he said, with whom he could ever have been
really happy--Isabel Walters: and Harold had stolen Isabel Walters away
from him by the basest treason. Once he could have loved Isabel, and her
only; now, because she was Harold's wife, he bitterly hated her. Yes,
hated her! With a deadly hatred he hated both of them.
Months went by slowly for Ernest Carnegie, in the dull drudgery of his
hopeless professional life, for he cared nothing now for ambition or
advancement; he lived wholly in the past, nursing his wrath, and
devouring his own soul in angry regretfulness. Months went by, and at
last Harold's wife gave birth to a baby--a boy, the exact image of his
father and his uncle. Harold looked at the child in the nurse's arms,
and said remorsefully, "We will call him Ernest. It is all we can do
now, Isabel. We will call him Ernest, after my dear lost brother." So
they called him Ernest, in the faint hope that his uncle's heart might
relent a little; and Harold wrote a letter full of deep and bitter
penitence to his brother, piteously begging his forgiveness for the
grievous wrong he had wickedly and deliberately done him. But Ernest
still nursed his righteous wrath silently in his own bosom, and tore up
the letter into a thousand fragments, unanswered.
When the baby was five months old, Edie Carnegie came round hurriedly
one morning to Ernest's lodgings near the hospital. "Ernest, Ernest,"
she cried, running up the stairs in great haste, "we want you to come
round and see Harold. We're afraid he's very ill. Don't say you won't
come and see him!"
Ernest Carnegie listened and smiled grimly. "Very ill," he muttered,
with a dreadful gleam in his eyes. "Very ill, is he? and I have had
nothing the matter with me! How curious! Very ill! I ought to have had
the same illness a fortnight ago. Ha, ha! The cycle is broken! The
clocks have ceased to strike together! His marriage has altered the run
of his constitution--mine remains the same steady striker as ever. I
thought it would! I thought it would! Perhaps he'll die, now, the mean,
miserable traitor!"
Edie Carnegie looked at him in undisguised horror. "Oh, Ernest," she
cried, with the utmost dismay; "your own brother! Your own brother!
Surely you'll come and see him, and tell us what's the matter."
"Yes, I'll come and see him," Ernest answered, unmoved, taking up his
hat. "I'll come and see him, and find out what's the matter." But there
was an awful air of malicious triumph in his tone, which perfectly
horrified his trembling sister.
When Ernest reached his brother's house, he went at once to Harold's
bedside, and without a word of introduction or recognition he began
inquiring into the nature of his symptoms, exactly as he would have done
with any unknown and ordinary patient. Harold told him them all, simply
and straightforwardly, without any more preface than he would have used
with any other doctor. When Ernest had finished his diagnosis, he leaned
back carelessly in his easy chair, folded his arms sternly, and said in
a perfectly cold, clear, remorseless voice, "Ah, I thought so; yes, yes,
I thought so. It's a serious functional disorder of the heart; and
there's very little hope indeed that you'll ever recover from it. No
hope at all, I may say; no hope at all, I'm certain. The thing has been
creeping upon you, creeping upon you, evidently, for a year past, and it
has gone too far now to leave the faintest hope of ultimate recovery."
Isabel burst into tears at the words--calmly spoken as though they were
perfectly indifferent to both speaker and hearers; but Harold only rose
up fiercely in the bed, and cried in a tone of the most imploring agony,
"Oh, Ernest, Ernest, if I must die, for Heaven's sake, before I die, say
you forgive me, do say, do say you forgive me. Oh, Ernest, dear Ernest,
dear brother Ernest, for the sake of our long, happy friendship, for the
sake of the days when we loved one another with a love passing the love
of women, do, do say you will at last forgive me."
Ernest rose and fumbled nervously for a second with the edge of his hat.
"Harold Carnegie," he said at last, in a voice trembling with
excitement, "I can never forgive you. You acted a mean, dirty part, and
I can never forgive you. Heaven may, perhaps it will; but as for me, I
can never, never, never forgive you!"
Harold fell back feebly and wearily upon the pillows. "Ernest, Ernest,"
he cried, gasping, "you might forgive me! you ought to forgive me! you
must forgive me! and I'll tell you why. I didn't want to say it, but now
you force me. I know it as well as if I'd seen you do it. In my place, I
know to a certainty, Ernest, you'd have done exactly as I did. Ernest
Carnegie, you can't look me straight in the face and tell me that you
wouldn't have acted exactly as I did."
That terrible unspoken truth, long known, but never confessed, even to
himself, struck like a knife on Ernest's heart. He raised his hat
blindly, and walked with unsteady steps out of the sick-room. At that
moment, his own conscience smote him with awful vividness. Looking into
the inmost recesses of his angry heart, he felt with a shudder that
Harold had spoken the simple truth, and he dared not lie by
contradicting him. In Harold's place he would have done exactly as
Harold did! And that was just what made his deathless anger burn all the
more fiercely and fervidly against his brother!
Groping his way down the stairs alone in a stunned and dazzled fashion,
Ernest Carnegie went home in his agony to his lonely lodgings, and sat
there solitary with his own tempestuous thoughts for the next
eight-and-forty hours. He did not undress or lie down to sleep, though
he dozed a little at times uneasily in his big arm-chair; he did not eat
or drink much; he merely paced up and down his room feverishly, and sent
his boy round at intervals of an hour or two to know how the doctor
thought Mr. Harold Carnegie was getting on. The boy returned every time
with uniformly worse and worse reports. Ernest rubbed his hands in
horrid exultation: "Ah," he said to himself, eagerly, "he will die! he
will die! he will pay the penalty of his dirty treachery! He has brought
it all upon himself by marrying that wicked woman! He deserves it every
bit for his mean conduct."
On the third morning, Edie came round again, this time with her mother.
Both had tears in their eyes, and they implored Ernest with sobs and
entreaties to come round and see Harold once more before he died. Harold
was raving and crying for him in his weakness and delirium. But Ernest
was like adamant. He would not go to see him, he said, not if they went
down bodily on their knees before him.
At midday, the boy went again, and stayed a little longer than usual.
When he returned, he brought back word that Mr. Harold Carnegie had died
just as the clock was striking the hour. Ernest listened with a look of
terror and dismay, and then broke down into a terrible fit of sobbing
and weeping. When Edie came round a little later to tell him that all
was over, she found him crying like a child in his own easy chair, and
muttering to himself in a broken fashion how dearly he and Harold had
loved one another years ago, when they were both happy children
together.
Edie took him round to his brother's house, and there, over the deaf and
blind face that lay cold upon the pillows, he cried the cry that he
would not cry over his living, imploring brother. "Oh, Harold, Harold,"
he groaned in his broken agony, "I forgive you, I forgive you. I too
sinned as you did. What you would do, I would do. It was bound up in
both our natures. In your place I would have done as you did. But now
the curse of Cain is upon me! A worse curse than Cain's is upon me! I
have more than killed my brother!"
For a day or two Ernest went back, heart-broken, to his father's house,
and slept once more in the old room where he used to sleep so long, next
door to Harold's. At the end of three days, he woke once from one of his
short snatches of sleep with a strange fluttering feeling in his left
side. He knew in a moment what it was. It was the same disease that
Harold had died of.
"Thank Heaven!" he said to himself eagerly, "thank Heaven, thank Heaven
for that! Then I didn't wholly kill him! His blood isn't all upon my
poor unhappy head. After all, his marriage didn't quite upset the
harmony of the two clocks; it only made the slower one catch up for a
while and pass the faster. I'm a fortnight later in striking than Harold
this time; that's all. In three days more the clock will run down, and I
shall die as he did."
And, true to time, in three days more, as the clock struck twelve,
Ernest Carnegie died as his brother Harold had done before him, with the
agonized cry for forgiveness trembling on his fevered lips--who knows
whether answered or unanswered?
_OLGA DAVIDOFF'S HUSBAND._