Chapter LXII

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.”