The Intoxicated Ghost, and other stories. Bates Arlo
n’t the diamonds that I’m crying for,” sobbed Irene, with all the naïveté of a child that has lost its pet toy. “It’s you!”
There was no withstanding this appeal. Arthur took her into his arms and comforted her, while Fanny discreetly looked the other way; and so the engagement was allowed to stand, although the McHugh diamonds had not been found.
But the next night Irene faced the ghost with an expression of contempt that might have withered the spirit of Hamlet’s sire.
“So you think it proper to deceive a lady?” she inquired scornfully. “Is that the way in which the gentlemen of the ‘old school,’ of which we hear so much, behaved?”
“Why, you should reflect,” the wraith responded waveringly, “that you had made me intoxicated.” And, indeed, the poor spirit still showed the effects of its debauch.
“You cannot have been very thoroughly intoxicated,” Irene returned, “or you would not have been able to deceive me.”
“But you see,” it answered, “that I drank only the ghost of wine, so that I really had only the ghost of inebriation.”
“But being a ghost yourself,” was her reply, “that should have been enough to intoxicate you completely.”
“I never argue with a lady,” said the ghost loftily, the subject evidently being too complicated for it to follow further. “At least I managed to put you as far as possible on the wrong scent.”
As it spoke, it gave the least possible turn of its eye toward the corner of the room diagonally opposite to that where it had disappeared on the previous night.
“Ah!” cried Irene, with sudden illumination.
She sprang up, and began to move from its place in the corner an old secretary which stood there. The thing was very heavy, but she did not call for help. She strained and tugged, the ghost showing evident signs of perturbation, until she had thrust the secretary aside, and then with her lamp beside her she sat down upon the floor and began to examine the wainscoting.
“Come away, please,” the ghost said piteously. “I hate to see you there on the floor. Come and sit by the fire.”
“Thank you,” she returned. “I am very comfortable where I am.”
She felt of the panels, she poked and pried, and for more than an hour she worked, while the ghost stood over her, begging that she go away. It was just as she was on the point of giving up that her fingers, rubbing up and down, started a morsel of dust from a tiny hole in the edge of a panel. She seized a hairpin from amid her locks, and thrust the point into the little opening. The panel started, moved slowly on a concealed hinge, and opened enough for her to insert her fingers and to push it back. A sort of closet lay revealed, and in it was a pile of cases, dusty, moth-eaten, and time-stained. She seized the first that came to hand, and opened it. There upon its bed of faded velvet blazed the “McHugh star,” superb in its beauty and a fortune in itself.
“Oh, my diamonds!” shrilled the ghost of Major McHugh. “Oh, what will our circle say!”
“They will have the right to say that you were rude to a lady,” Irene answered, with gratuitous severity. “You have wasted your opportunity of being put on record.”
“Now I am only a drinking ghost!” the wraith wailed, and faded away upon the air.
Thus it came about that on her wedding-day Irene wore the “McHugh star;” and yet, such is human perversity that she has not only been convinced by her husband that ghosts do not exist, but she has lost completely the power of seeing them, although that singular and valuable gift had come to her, as has been said, by inheritance from a great-aunt on her mother’s side of the family.
A PROBLEM IN PORTRAITURE
“It does not look like him,” Celia Sathman said, moving aside a little that the afternoon light might fall more fully upon a portrait standing unfinished upon the easel; “and yet it is unquestionably the best picture you ever painted. It interests me, it fascinates me; and I never had at all that feeling about Ralph himself. And yet,” she added, smiling at her own inconsistency, “it is like him. It is n’t what I call a good likeness, and yet – ”
The artist, Tom Claymore, leaned back in his chair and smiled.
“You are right and wrong,” he said. “I am a little disappointed that you don’t catch the secret of the picture. I knew Ralph would n’t understand, but I had hopes of you.”
A puzzled look came into Celia’s face as she continued to study the canvas. Her companion smoked a cigarette, and watched her with a regard which was at once fond and a little amused.
The studio was a great room which had originally been devoted to no less prosaic an occupation than the painting of oil-cloth carpeting, great splashes of color, which time and dust had softened into a pleasing dimness, remaining to testify to its former character. It stood down among the wharves of old Salem, a town where even the new is scarcely to be distinguished from the old, and Tom had been delighted with its roomy quiet, the play of light and shadow among the bare beams overhead, and the ease with which he had been able to make it serve his purpose. He had done comparatively little toward furnishing it for his summer occupancy. He had hung a few worn-out seines over the high beams, and placed here and there his latest acquisitions in the way of bric-à-brac, while numerous sketches were pinned to the walls with no attempt at order. On the door he had fastened a zither, of which the strings were struck by nicely balanced hammers when the door was moved, and in the still rather barn-like room, he had established himself to teach and to paint through the summer months.
“I cannot make it out at all,” Celia said at last, turning away from the easel and walking toward Claymore. “It looks older and stronger than Ralph, as if – Ah!” she interrupted herself suddenly, a new light breaking in her face. “Now I see! You have been painting his possibilities. You are making a portrait of him as he will be.”
“As he may be,” Claymore corrected her, his words showing that her conjecture was in truth the key to the riddle. “When I began to paint Ralph, I was at once struck by the undeveloped state of his face. It seemed to me like a bud that had n’t opened; and I began at once to try and guess what it would grow into. I did n’t at first mean to paint it so, but the notion mastered me, and now I deliberately give myself up to the impulse. I don’t know whether it’s professional, but it is great fun.”
Celia went back and looked at the picture once more, but she soon returned to stand leaning upon the tall back of the chair in which her betrothed was sitting.
“It is getting too dark to see it,” she remarked; “but your experiment interests me wonderfully. You say you are painting what his face may be; why not what his face must be?”
“Because,” the artist replied, “I am trying to get in the best of his possibilities; to paint the noblest there is in him. How can I tell if he will in life realize it? He may develop his worst side, you know, instead of his best.”
Celia was silent a moment. The darkness seemed to have gathered quickly, rising clouds cutting off the light of the after-glow which had followed the sunset with delusive promise. She leaned forward and laid her finger-tips lightly upon Tom’s forehead with a caressing motion.
“You are a clever man,” she said. “It is fortunate you are a good one.”
“Oh,” he returned, almost brusquely, though he took her hand and kissed it, “I don’t know that I can lay claim to any especial virtue. Are you remembering Hawthorne’s story of ‘The Prophetic Pictures,’ that you think my goodness particularly fortunate in this connection?”
Instead of replying, she moved across the studio with her graceful, firm walk, which had won Tom’s deep admiration before he knew even her name. She took up a light old-fashioned silk shawl, yellow with time, and threw it across her arm.
“I must go home,” she remarked, as if no subject were under discussion. “I am sure I don’t know what I was thinking of to stay here so late.”
“Oh,