past.”
“I remember nothing,” I said. “Oh, my dear lady, my dear sweetheart—I remember nothing but that I love you—that I have loved you all my life.”
“You remember nothing—really nothing?”
“Only that I am yours; that we have both suffered; that——Tell me, my mistress dear, all that you remember. Explain it all to me. Make me understand. And yet——No, I don’t want to understand. It is enough that we are together.”
If it was a dream, why have I never dreamed it again?
She leaned down towards me, her arm lay on my neck, and drew my head till it rested on her shoulder. “I am a ghost, I suppose,” she said, laughing softly; and her laughter stirred memories which I just grasped at, and just missed. “But you and I know better, don’t we? I will tell you everything you have forgotten. We loved each other—ah! no, you have not forgotten that—and when you came back from the war we were to be married. Our pictures were painted before you went away. You know I was more learned than women of that day. Dear one, when you were gone they said I was a witch. They tried me. They said I should be burned. Just because I had looked at the stars and had gained more knowledge than they, they must needs bind me to a stake and let me be eaten by the fire. And you far away!”
Her whole body trembled and shrank. O love, what dream would have told me that my kisses would soothe even that memory?
“The night before,” she went on, “the devil did come to me. I was innocent before—you know it, don’t you? And even then my sin was for you—for you—because of the exceeding love I bore you. The devil came, and I sold my soul to eternal flame. But I got a good price. I got the right to come back, through my picture (if any one looking at it wished for me), as long as my picture stayed in its ebony frame. That frame was not carved by man’s hand. I got the right to come back to you. Oh, my heart’s heart, and another thing I won, which you shall hear anon. They burned me for a witch, they made me suffer hell on earth. Those faces, all crowding round, the crackling wood and the smell of the smoke——”
“O love! no more—no more.”
“When my mother sat that night before my picture she wept, and cried, ‘Come back, my poor lost child!’ And I went to her, with glad leaps of heart. Dear, she shrank from me, she fled, she shrieked and moaned of ghosts. She had our pictures covered from sight and put again in the ebony frame. She had promised me my picture should stay always there. Ah, through all these years your face was against mine.”
She paused.
“But the man you loved?”
“You came home. My picture was gone. They lied to you, and you married another woman; but some day I knew you would walk the world again and that I should find you.”
“The other gain?” I asked.
“The other gain,” she said slowly, “I gave my soul for. It is this. If you also will give up your hopes of heaven I can remain a woman, I can move in your world—I can be your wife. Oh, my dear, after all these years, at last—at last.”
“If I sacrifice my soul,” I said slowly, with no thought of the imbecility of such talk in our “so-called nineteenth century”—“if I sacrifice my soul, I win you? Why, love, it’s a contradiction in terms. You are my soul.”
Her eyes looked straight into mine. Whatever might happen, whatever did happen, whatever may happen, our two souls in that moment met, and became one.
“Then you choose—you deliberately choose—to give up your hopes of heaven for me, as I gave up mine for you?”
“I decline,” I said, “to give up my hope of heaven on any terms. Tell me what I must do, that you and I may make our heaven here—as now, my dear love.”
“I will tell you tomorrow,” she said. “Be alone here tomorrow night—twelve is ghost’s time, isn’t it?—and then I will come out of the picture and never go back to it. I shall live with you, and die, and be buried, and there will be an end of me. But we shall live first, my heart’s heart.”
I laid my head on her knee. A strange drowsiness overcame me. Holding her hand against my cheek, I lost consciousness. When I awoke the grey November dawn was glimmering, ghost-like, through the uncurtained window. My head was pillowed on my arm, which rested—I raised my head quickly—ah! not on my lady’s knee, but on the needle-worked cushion of the straight-backed chair. I sprang to my feet. I was stiff with cold, and dazed with dreams, but I turned my eyes on the picture. There she sat, my lady, my dear love. I held out my arms, but the passionate cry I would have uttered died on my lips. She had said twelve o’clock. Her lightest word was my law. So I only stood in front of the picture and gazed into those grey-green eyes till tears of passionate happiness filled my own.
“Oh, my dear, my dear, how shall I pass the hours till I hold you again?”
No thought, then, of my whole life’s completion and consummation being a dream.
I staggered up to my room, fell across my bed, and slept heavily and dreamlessly. When I awoke it was high noon. Mildred and her mother were coming to lunch.
I remembered, at one shock, Mildred’s coming and her existence.
Now, indeed, the dream began.
With a penetrating sense of the futility of any action apart from her, I gave the necessary orders for the reception of my guests. When Mildred and her mother came I received them with cordiality; but my genial phrases all seemed to be some one else’s. My voice sounded like an echo; my heart was other where.
Still, the situation was not intolerable until the hour when afternoon tea was served in the drawing-room. Mildred and her mother kept the conversational pot boiling with a profusion of genteel commonplaces, and I bore it, as one can bear mild purgatories when one is in sight of heaven. I looked up at my sweetheart in the ebony frame, and I felt that anything that might happen, any irresponsible imbecility, any bathos of boredom, was nothing, if, after it all, she came to me again.
And yet, when Mildred, too, looked at the portrait, and said, “What a fine lady! One of your flames, Mr. Devigne?” I had a sickening sense of impotent irritation, which became absolute torture when Mildred—how could I ever have admired that chocolate-box barmaid style of prettiness?—threw herself into the high-backed chair, covering the needlework with her ridiculous flounces, and added, “Silence gives consent! Who is it, Mr. Devigne? Tell us all about her: I am sure she has a story.”
Poor little Mildred, sitting there smiling, serene in her confidence that her every word charmed me—sitting there with her rather pinched waist, her rather tight boots, her rather vulgar voice—sitting in the chair where my dear lady had sat when she told me her story! I could not bear it.
“Don’t sit there,” I said; “it’s not comfortable!”
But the girl would not be warned. With a laugh that set every nerve in my body vibrating with annoyance, she said, “Oh, dear! mustn’t I even sit in the same chair as your black-velvet woman?”
I looked at the chair in the picture. It was the same; and in her chair Mildred was sitting. Then a horrible sense of the reality of Mildred came upon me. Was all this a reality after all? But for fortunate chance might Mildred have occupied, not only her chair, but her place in my life? I rose.
“I hope you won’t think me very rude,” I said; “but I am obliged to go out.”
I forget what appointment I alleged. The lie came readily enough.
I faced Mildred’s pouts with the hope that she and her mother would not wait dinner for me. I fled. In another minute I was safe, alone, under the chill, cloudy autumn sky—free to think, think, think of my dear lady.
I walked for hours along streets and squares; I lived over again and again every look, word, and hand-touch—every kiss; I was completely, unspeakably happy.
Mildred was utterly forgotten: my lady of the ebony frame