GHOST OR WOMAN?
Winifred spoke with such concerted force of inner conviction that, absurd and incredible as he knew it to be for had he not seen Elsie’s own grave that day at Orfordness? Hugh rushed over to the window in a fever of sudden suspense and anxiety, and gazed across the street to the exact spot where Winifred’s ghost-like finger pointed eagerly to some person or thing on the pavement opposite. He was almost too late, however, to prove her wrong. As he neared the window, he caught but a glimpse of a graceful figure in light half-mourning like Elsie’s, to be sure, in general outline, though distinctly a trifle older and fuller disappearing in haste round the corner by the pharmacy.
The figure gave him none the less a shock of surprise. It was certainly a very strange and awkward coincidence. He hadn’t been in time to catch the face, indeed, as Winifred had done; but the figure alone, the figure recalled every trait of Elsie’s. How singular, after Winifred had come to San Remo with this profound belief in Elsie’s living there, that on the very first day of their stay in the town they should happen to light by pure accident upon a person so closely recalling Elsie! Surely, surely the stars in their courses were fighting against him. Warren Relf could not be blamed for this. It was destiny, sheer adverse destiny. Accidental resemblances and horrid coincidences were falling together blindly with unconscious cunning, on purpose, as it were, to spite and disconcert him. The laws of chance were setting themselves by the ears for his special discomfiture. No ordinary calculation could account for this. It had in it something almost supernatural. He glanced at Winifred. She stood triumphant there triumphant but heart-broken exulting over his defeat with one dying “I told you so,” and chuckling out inarticulately in her thin small voice, with womanish persistence: “That’s she! that’s Elsie!”
“It’s very like her!” he moaned in his agony.
“Very like her!” Winifred cried with a fresh burst of unnatural strength. “Very like her! Oh, Hugh, I despise you! I tell you I saw her face to face! It’s Elsie it’s Elsie!”
A picture sometimes darts across one’s eyes for a brief moment, and remains vaguely photographed for a space on the retina, but uninterpreted by the brain, till it grows, as we dwell upon it mentally afterward, even clearer and clearer, and at last with a burst flashes its real significance fully home to us in a flood of conviction. As Hugh stood there, absorbed, by the half-open window, the picture he had caught of that slight lithe figure sweeping round the corner with Elsie’s well-known gait come home to him thus with a sudden rush of indubitable certainty. He no longer hesitated. He saw it was so. He knew her now! It was Elsie, Elsie!
His brain reeled and whirled with the unexpected shock; the universe turned round on him as on a pivot. “Winifred,” he cried, “you’re right! you’re right! There can’t be anybody else on earth so like her! I don’t know how she’s come back to life! She’s dead and buried at Orfordness! It’s a miracle!- a miracle! But that’s she that we saw! I can’t deny it. That’s she! that’s Elsie!”
His hat lay thrown down on the table by his side. He snatched it up in his eager haste to follow and track down this mysterious resemblance. He couldn’t let Elsie’s double, her bodily simulacrum, walk down the street unnoticed and unquestioned. A profound horror possessed his soul. A doubter by nature, he seemed to feel the solid earth failing beneath his feet. He had never before in all his life drawn so perilously close to the very verge and margin of the unseen universe. It was Elsie herself, or else the grave had yielded up its shadowy occupant.
He rushed to the door, on fire with his sense of mystery and astonishment. A lotyi laugh by his side held him back as he went. He turned round. It was Winifred, laughing, choking, exultant, hysterical. She flung herself down on the sofa now, and was catching her breath in spasmodic bursts with unnatural merriment. That was the awful kind of laughter that bodes no good to those who laugh it hollow, horrible, mocking, delusive. Hugh saw at a glance she was dangerously ill. Her mirth was the mirth of a mania, and worse. With a burning soul and a chafing heart, he turned back, as in duty bound, to her side again. He must leave Elsie’s wraith to walk by itself, unexplained and uninvestigated, its ghostly way down the streets of San Remo. He had more than enough to do at home. Winifred was dying! dying of laughter.
And yet her laugh seemed almost hilarious. In spite of all, it had a ghastly ring of victory and boisterous joy in it. “Oh, Hugh,” she cried, with little choking chuckles, in the brief intervals of her spasmodic peals, “you’re too absurd! You’ll kill me! you’ll kill me! I can’t help laughing; it’s so ridiculous. You tell me one minute, with solemn oaths and ingenious lies, you’ve seen her grave you know she’s dead and buried: you pull long faces till you almost force me to believe you you positively cry and moan and groan over her and then the next second, when she passes the window before my very eyes, alive and well, and in her right mind, you seize your hat, you want to rush out and find her and embrace her here, this moment, right under my face and leave me alone to die by myself, without one soul on earth to wait upon me or help me!” Her emotion supplied her with words and images above her own level. “It’s just grotesque,” she went on after a pause. “It’s inhuman in its absurdity. Wicked as you are, and shameless as you are, it’s impossible for any one to take you seriously. You’re the living embodiment of a little, inconsequent, meddling, muddling, mischief-making medieval demon. You’re a burlesque Mephistopheles. You’ve got no soul, and you’ve got no feelings. But you make me laugh! Oh, you make me laugh! You’ve broken my heart; but you’ll be the death of me. Puck and Don Juan rolled into one! ‘Elsie’s dead! Why, there’s dear Elsie!’ It’s too incongruous; it’s too ridiculous.” And she exploded once more in a hideous semblance of laughter.
Hugh gazed at her blankly, sobered with alarm. Was she going mad? or was he mad himself? that he should see visions, and meet dead Elsie! Could it really be Elsie? He had heard strange stories of appearances and second-sight, such as mystics among us love to dwell upon; and in all of them the appearances were closely connected with death-bed scenes. Could any truth lurk, after all, in those discredited tales of wraiths and visions? Could Elsie’s ghost have come from the grave to prepare him betimes for Winifred’s funeral? Or did Winifred’s dying mind, by some strange alchemy, project, as it were, an image of Elsie, who filled her soul, on to his own eye and brain, as he sat there beside her?
He brushed away these metaphysical cobwebs with a dash of his hand. Fool that he was to be led away thus by a mere accidental coincidence or resemblance! He was tired with sleeplessness; emotion had unmanned him.
Winifred’s laugh dissolved itself into tears. She broke down now, hysterically, utterly. She sobbed and moaned in agony on the sofa. Deep sighs and loud laughter alternated horribly in her storm of emotion. The worst had come. She was dangerously ill. Hugh feared in his heart she was on the point of dying.
“Go!’! she burst out, in one spasmodic effort, thrusting him away from her side with the palm of her hand. “I don’t want you here. Go go to Elsie! I can die now. I’ve found you all out. You’re both of you alike; you’ve both of you deceived me.”
Hugh rang the bell wildly for the Swiss waiter. “Send the chambermaid!” he cried in his broken Italian. “The patroness! A lady! The signora is ill. No time to be lost. I must run at once and find the English doctor.”
When Winifred looked around her again, she found two or three strange faces crowded beside the bed on which they had laid her, and a fresh young Italian girl, the landlady’s daughter, holding her head and bathing her brows with that universal specific, orange-flower water. The faint perfume revived her a little. The landlady’s daughter was a comely girl, with sympathetic eyes, and she smiled the winsome Italian smile as the poor pale child opened her lids and looked vaguely up at her. “Don’t cry, signorina,” she said soothingly Then her glance fell, woman-like, upon the plain gold ring on Winifred’s thin and wasted fourth finger, and she corrected herself half unconsciously: “Don’t cry, signora. Your husband will soon be back by your side: he’s gone to fetch the English doctor.”
“I don’t want him,” Winifred cried, with intense yearning, in her boarding-school French, for she knew barely enough Italian to understand her new little friend. “I don’t want my husband; I want Elsie. Keep him away from me keep him away, I pray. Hold my hand yourself, and send away my husband! Je ne l’aime pas, cet hommela!” And she burst once more into a discordant peal of hysterical laughter.
“The poor signora!” the girl murmured, with wide open eyes, to the others around. “Her husband is cruel. Ah, wicked wretch! Hear what she says! She says she doesn’t want any more to see him. She wants her sister!”
As she spoke, a white face appeared suddenly at the door a bearded man’s face, silent and sympathetic. Warren Relf had heard the commotion downstairs, from his room above, and had seen Massinger run in hot haste for the doctor. He had come down now with eager inquiry for poor wasted Winifred, whose face and figure had impressed him much as he saw her borne out by the porters at the railway station.
“Is the signora very ill?” he asked in a low voice of the nearest woman. “She speaks no Italian, I fear. Can I be of any use to her?”
“Ecco! ’tis Signor Relf, the English artist!” the woman cried, in surprise; for all San Remo knew Warren well as an old inhabitant. “Come in, signor,” she continued, with Italian frankness for bedrooms in Italy are less sacred than in England. “You know the signora? She is ill very ill: she is faint she is dying.”
At the name, Winifred turned her eyes languidly to the door, and raised herself, still dressed in her traveling dress, on her elbows on the bed. She yearned for sympathy. If only she could fling herself on Elsie’s shoulder! Elsie, who had wronged her, would at least pity her. “Mr. Relf,” she cried, too weak to be surprised, but glad to welcome a fellow-countryman and acquaintance among so many strangers and with Hugh himself worse than a stranger “I’m going to die. But I want to speak to you. You know the truth. Tell me about Elsie. Why did Elsie Challoner deceive me?”
“Deceive you!” Warren answered, drawing nearer in his horror. “She didn’t deceive you. She couldn’t deceive you. She only wished to spare your heart from suffering all her own heart had suffered. Elsie could never deceive any one.”
“But why did she write to say she was in Australia, when she was really living here in San Remo?” Winifred asked piteously. “And why did she keep up a correspondence with my husband?”
“Write she was in Australia! She never wrote,” Warren cried in haste, seizing the poor dying girl’s thin hand in his. “Mrs. Massinger, this is no time to conceal anything. I dare not speak to you against your husband, but still.”
“I hate him!” Winifred gasped out, with concentrated loathing. “He has done nothing since I knew him but lie to me and deceive me. Don’t mind speaking ill of him; I don’t object to that. What kills me is that Elsie has helped him! Elsie has helped him!”
“Elsie has not,” Warren answered, lifting up her white little hand to his lips and kissing it respectfully. “Elsie and I are very close friends. Elsie has always loved you dearly. If she’s hidden anything from you, she hid it for your own sake alone. It was Hugh Massinger who forged those letters. I can’t let you die thinking ill of Elsie. Elsie has never, never written to him. I know it all. I’ll tell you the truth. Your husband thought she was drowned at Whitestrand!”
“Then Hugh doesn’t know she’s living here?” Winifred cried eagerly.
Warren Relf hardly knew how to answer her in this unexpected crisis. It was a terrible moment. He couldn’t expose Elsie to the chance of meeting Hugh face to face. The shock and strain, he knew, would be hard for her to bear. But, on the other hand, he couldn’t let that poor broken-hearted little woman die with this fearful load of misery unlightened on her bosom. The truth was best. The truth is always safest. “Hugh doesn’t know she’s living here,” he answered slowly. “But if I could only be sure that Hugh and she would not meet, I’d bring her round, before she leaves San Remo, this very day, and let you hear from her own lips, beyond dispute, her true story.”
Winifred clenched her thin hands hard and tight. “He shall never enter this room again,” she whispered hoarsely, “till he enters it to see me laid out for burial.”
Warren Relf drew back, horrified at her unnatural sternness. “Oh no,” he cried. “Mrs. Massinger you don’t mean that: remember, he’s your husband.”
“He never was my husband,” Winifred answered with a fresh burst of her feverish energy. “He was Elsie’s husbandElsie’s at heart. He loved Elsie. He never married me myself at all; he married only the manor of Whitestrand. He shall never come near me again while I live. I shall hold him off. I’m a weak woman; but I’ve strength enough and will enough left for that. I shall keep him at arm’s length as long as I live. Don’t be afraid. Bring Elsie here; I want to see her. I should die happy if only I knew that Elsie hadn’t helped that man to deceive me.”
Meanwhile, Hugh Massinger was hurrying along on his way to the English doctor’s, saying to himself a thousand times over: “I don’t care how much she thinks ill of me; but I can’t endure she should die thinking ill of poor dead Elsie. If only I could make her believe me in that. If only she knew that Elsie was true to her, that poor dead Elsie had never deceived her!” He had so much chivalry, so much earnestness, so much of devotion, still left in him. But he thought most of poor dead Elsie, not at all of poor deceived and dying Winifred. For he no longer believed it was really Elsie he had seen in the street: the delusion had come and gone in a flash. How could it be Elsie? Such sights are impossible. He was no dreamer of dreams or seer of visions. Elsie was dead and buried at Orfordness, and this other figure was only, after all, very, very like her.