THE GHOST
You know, too, of that night. But this you do not know—that a mile out of the village I sat on a boulder in a hillside pasture and watched the flames of a terrible fire, without any knowledge of what house was burning, and that it was not until a man came along the road long after daybreak, with a shovel over his shoulder, that I had the energy to stir.
He saw me as I got up; he waved his hand.
“Bad fire,” he shouted, not recognizing me.
“Whose house?” I asked.
“Judge Colfax.”
My heart came gurgling up into my throat.
“Anybody lost in it?” I asked, trembling.
“No,” said he. “Everybody got out. The servant got out and the Judge saved his baby and there wasn’t anybody else in it. Those three. That was all.”
His words stunned me at first. I said them over and over after he had gone, because I could not seem to believe their meaning. Those three! That was all! What I could not do by my will, another Will had done. The Great Hand had swept away my fears! Above my grief I felt the presence of one marvelous fact. The inheritance I had allowed to escape me had been ended again! Once more my body was the only body in all the world containing the terrible ingredients of my strain of blood. I raised my face toward the blue of heaven and gave vent to a long cry of triumphant, hysterical, passionate exultation.
I became possessed of the desire to make sure, to ask again, to hear once more the phrase, “Those three. That was all,” and then turn my back on the town forever. With this idea I walked swiftly into the village, choosing a back street until I had reached a point opposite the smoking ruins of the Judge’s house. The crowd was still buzzing back and forth along the fence and gathered about the old-fashioned fire engine that was still spitting sparks and pumping water. I slipped into the back yard of the house just across the street, half afraid to show myself, half mad to ask some one the question I had asked the man with the shovel.
Then, suddenly, as I stood hesitating, I heard Margaret Murchie’s voice in the window above me—I recognized it instantly.
“There is some one at the door, Judge. The secret is safe with me,” she whispered.
At the same moment something fell at my feet. It was the tiny locket my child had worn on its little neck from the day the mother had fastened it there. What secret had Margaret meant? The locket was the answer! I had been a plaything of some unknown, malicious fiend again. The rescued baby was not the Judge’s baby. That was the secret! The child I heard crying there was mine!
I felt like a creature in a haunted place, pursued by devils, mocked by strange voices in the air, deceived by the senses, tricked by unrealities, persecuted by memories, the victim of fear, falsities, and impotent rage. I rushed away from the spot, walked many miles, and at last, coming to the railroad again, I took a train and for weeks, without money, rode westward on freight trains. I dropped out of sight. I lost my name. I even lost much of my flesh. I was as thoroughly dead as a living man could be. The world had buried me.
Almost immediately the body and its organs, which had borne up with such infernal endurance for the express purpose of making the ruin of my soul complete, gave way. Suddenly my stomach, as if possessing a malicious intelligence of its own, refused the stimulant with which I had helped to accomplish my slide to the bottom of life and with which I had expected to be able to dull the mental and physical pains of my final accounting. My mind now found itself picturing with feverish desire all the old pleasures. At the same moment my flesh and bones forbade me to enjoy them. My body had caught my mind like a rat in a trap!
Day followed day, week, week, and year, year. It was a weary monotony of manual labor, poverty, restless travel, on foot, and hopeless attempts to recover my birthright—the privileges of excess—which had gone from me forever. Cities and their bright lights laughed at me.
I suffered the tortures of insomnia, the pains of violent rheumatism, the dreadful imprisonment of a partial paralysis. I was in and out of hospitals. I spent months on my back, entertained only by my lurid memories. My mind became starved for new material on which to work. It was at that period that I first learned to obscure the awful presence of my own personality by flinging my thoughts into the problems of chess.
I recalled often enough the fact that somewhere I had a daughter. No night passed that I did not go to sleep wondering where she might be. I realized that she was growing up somewhere. I realized, too, that a child of fancy was growing up in my mind. I could see her in her crib, a laughing baby uttering meaningless sounds, clasping a flower in her fat little fist. I could see her in short skirts, trying to walk upstairs, clinging to the banister. I could hear her first words. I saw her learning to read. Little by little her hair grew. It reached a length which made a braid necessary. At times I saw her laugh,—this child of the imagination,—and once, left alone at dusk, she had wept over some cross word that had been spoken to her. I could see her tears glisten on her cheeks in the fading light.
“Little girl!” I cried aloud. “Come to me! It’s I! Little girl!”
The sound of my own voice startled me. I found myself sitting in the Denver railroad station with my hands clasped around my thin knees.
No man’s own blood ever haunted him more than mine. I had not seen the child, yet I loved her. She had no knowledge of my existence, yet she seemed to call to me. I suffered a dreadful thought—the fear that I should die before I saw her and feasted my eyes upon my own. I struggled to keep myself from going to seek her. I felt as one who, being dead, impotently desires to return to the world and touch the hands of the living. Year after year the desire grew strong to rise from my grave and call out that she was mine.
At last I yielded to my temptation—fool that I was! I came eastward. I made cautious inquiry. I arrived in this city where I had heard the Judge had gone. The mere fact of proximity to her made me tremble as I alighted from the train. I had expected difficulties in finding her. But when I telephoned to the name I had found in the book and heard a voice say that the Judge had just gone out with his daughter, I felt that I was in a dream. A strange faintness came over me. The glass door of the booth reflected my image—the face of a frightened old man. It was remarkable that I did not fall forward sprawling, unconscious.
Before seeking a lodging I sat for hours in a park. Young girls passed, fresh, beautiful, laughing, going home from school.
“Can that be she?” I asked a dozen times, looking after one of those chosen from among the others. “What can she be like? What would she say to me?”
Suddenly I realized again that I did not exist, that she could not know that I had ever existed, that whatever pain it might cost me, she must never know. If I saw her, it must be as a ghost peeping through a crevice in the wall. These were my thoughts as I sat on the park bench hour after hour until a little outcast pup—a thin, bony creature, kicked and beaten, came slinking out of the gathering dusk and licked my hand. It was the first love I had felt in years. My whole being screamed for it. I caught up the pariah and warmed its shivering body in my arms. This was the dog that, two years later, I lost along with the locket in the Judge’s old garden where I had gone indiscreetly, praying that I might get a peep in the window and see my own girl—so wonderful, so beautiful, so good—reading by the lamp.
You need not think I had not seen her before. If I spent my working hours manipulating the automaton at the old museum, all my leisure I spent in seeking a glimpse of my own daughter. The very sight of her was nourishment to my starving heart. Many is the time I have hobbled along far behind her as she walked on the city pavements. Months on end I strolled by the house at night to throw an unseen caress up at a lighted window. I have seen a doctor’s carriage at that door with my heart in my mouth. I have seen admiration, given by a glance from a girl friend, with a father’s pride so great and real that it took strength of mind to restrain myself from stopping the nearest passer-by and saying, “Look! She is mine!”
Again the malicious fortune into which I was born was making game of me; it had made my daughter more than a mere girl, whom I was forbidden to claim. It had made her the loveliest creature in the world! I cried out against it all. I knew that if I would, I could claim her. She was mine. I had the right of a father. She was still a child. I loved her. I wanted to have the world know that whatever else I had done and whatever doubts I had once felt about the blood that was in my veins and hers, now I was sure that I could claim a great achievement and hold aloft the gift to mankind of this blooming flower.
I remembered then, however, what I had been. I saw in the bit of mirror in my squalid lodgings a countenance stained with the indelible ink of vice and moulded beyond repair by excesses and the sufferings of shame. Could I present this horror to my daughter? Could I destroy her by claiming her? Could I blight her life by thrusting my love for her beyond the secret recesses of my own heart?
“No!” I whispered. And I prayed for strength.
Above all, I knew that except for regaining, by reading books, the refinement of my youth, I was not changed. I knew I was not, and never should be free from the old vicious fiends within myself. I could not, had I come to her with health, prosperity, and a good name, have offered her safety from my brutal nature. I had even abused the dog which had been my only companion and the one living thing that had love for me in its heart. I can see its eyes upon me now, with their reproach, and, I imagine, with their distrust. I had cowed its spirit with my passions of rage, my kicks and my curses, for each of which I had felt a torment of regret and with each of which came a hundred vain vows to myself never to let my nature get the best of me again. I had grown old, but I could not trust myself more than before. I even feared that some day I might reveal voluntarily my existence to my daughter, so that a final and terrible, unspeakable culminating evil deed should mark the end of my career. I feared this even more than another narrow escape from accidental disclosure, such as I had had in my first attempt to enter the old garden on that winter night I remember so well.
At these times I have kept away for weeks and weeks, mad for want of the sight of her. I had been forbidden liquor by wrecked organs, but now the sound of her voice at a distance, the sight of her perfect skin was like a draft of wine to me. Crazed with the lack of it, I always at last gave up my struggle, and with my heart filled with the tormented affections of a father, I went back to my watching and waiting, to my interest in her school, her clothes, her young friends, her health, her afternoon walks. I watched Margaret Murchie, too, with strange memories that caught me by the throat. And ever and ever I watched the Judge. Unseen, unknown, careful never to show myself often in the neighborhood for fear of attracting attention, as sly as a fox, suffering like a thing in an inferno, and no more than a lonesome ghost, I tried to determine if the Judge were acting my part as he should—he who had taken what was mine by the gift of God.
Chance, as you now know, threw him into a place where he was no longer a stranger to me. He became a visitor to the “Man with the Rolling Eye,” though I believe he used to call my automaton “The Sheik of Baalbec.” It was my delight to beat him in a battle of skill and at the same time, from my peephole, scan his face to read his character.
At last one day he brought this young man, Estabrook.
What awakened all my sense of danger then, I cannot explain. I only know that as this young man walked toward the machine, I realized a truth that had never so presented itself before. My daughter was no longer a girl! She was now a woman! Some man would come for her. And I believe I would have been filled with hatred and fear, no matter what man he had been.
That night I tossed upon my bed, feverish with new thoughts. I realized that soon there would be a turn in the road of my own child’s destiny. I realized with agony which I cannot describe that I could use no guiding hand. I hungered for the responsibility of a father. I cried out aloud that now, in this choosing of men, I should have a word. I writhed as I had often writhed, because, loving her too much, I was forbidden to perform the offices of my affection. The tears that had come before now came again, and I wept for hours, as I had wept on other occasions.
I began a new and indiscreet observation. I found that this young man was a real menace. I followed him as he walked with her, liking him no better when I saw a look in my daughter’s eyes that never had been there before. I would have interfered with his lovemaking, had I been able.
“God,” I whispered, “I am only a ghost!”
Then chance gave me, I thought, an opportunity to strike at his courage. He is here. He can tell you of the message the automaton scrawled for him on a bit of paper. But he cannot tell the anxious hours, the frantic hours, a tormented outcast spent before that message was written, lurking in front of the Judge’s house, watching with eyes red with sleeplessness for every little sign of what was going on. Nor can he tell you of the terror that came into a lonely creature’s soul the night the Judge came down his front steps and met a shadow of the past, face to face. It is only I who may describe the horror of that meeting. The recognition of my identity by a dog who whined and cowered, and then by a man, whose breath gurgled in his throat and whose skin turned white, are things that no man knows but me.
I can see the Judge’s face now. It looked upon me with the same accusing expression that I knew so well, and I slunk away believing that the worst had at last come. He had seen behind the mask of my years, my physical decline and my suffering. In one glance, before he turned dizzily back toward the house, he had taken my secret away from me. He knew me!
The madness of desperation came over me then. It was that which caused me to write the message through the hand of my automaton; it was that which led me to conceive the folly that, being known by the Judge to be living, I might, in the name of my love for my daughter, tell him out of my own mouth that I would never molest them.
I had stood all that man could bear. For the second time in my desperation, I entered the garden. I climbed the balcony. The Judge was there. Estabrook was there. They both saw me. I fled with their staring eyes pursuing me.
What more can I tell?
You have heard.
I am a miserable man.
| BOOK VII THE PANELED DOOR |