The Mystery of Evelin Delorme: A Hypnotic Story

by Albert Bigelow Paine

Perhaps Julian Goetze did not willingly abide by the somewhat fallacious reasoning of his friend. It is more than probable that each time he succumbed to the savage elements of his nature, he did so with reluctance and shame, with subsequent remorse, and good resolutions formed a score of times, perhaps, to be as often broken.

As the weeks went by he became more and more involved in this singular affair. In a way he had found it possible, as his friend had once suggested, to be in love with two women at one time.

When he was with Eva Delorme his love for the pure, beautiful girl seemed to take entire possession of his life. Evelin March, for the time, was as hateful to him as his own weakness, or was wholly forgotten.

When in the presence of Evelin March his better self shrank away before the fierce heredity within him, and the face of Eva Delorme became only a dim, haunting ghost that taunted him with his treachery.

Of the lives of these two he knew absolutely nothing. The evident distress which his reference to relatives and friends had occasioned Eva during their first meeting, had caused him carefully to avoid the subject afterward; and the other, who had never referred to her family, he had not cared to know. He had never even considered whether she was wife, maid or widow, until he suddenly became aware that the sentiment he had awakened within her was not, as he had at first supposed, a passing fancy, but a fierce passion of jealous and tyrannical love. She no longer rallied him, and parried his compliments with her light, pointed sarcasm, as she had done at first, but assumed an unmistakable bearing of ownership and possession—questioning him closely regarding other sitters and female acquaintances—while he writhed helplessly in the exquisite misery of a spell which he felt himself powerless to break.

Thus far he had never surrendered himself entirely to this passion. More than once he had hesitated on the very brink of the precipice. Whether it was the haunting face of Eva Delorme that stayed him, or something in the manner of the other, he could not tell.

One day he suddenly caught her in his arms. She suffered his embrace for a moment, then drew away from him.

"When we are married, Paul," she said, tenderly, "I will take you to Italy, where in some beautiful villa we will give ourselves up wholly to our love. I am rich, Paul, rich; and it is all yours, but we must wait."

He turned white and was silent. The thought of marriage with this woman had never entered his head. He had already asked Eva Delorme to be his wife. She had long since confessed her love for him, but had deferred her answer from week to week, and with such evident distress of mind that the young artist felt that a secret sorrow lay heavily upon her life. He longed to fly with her to some far country, away from it all, and from the dark shadows that encompassed his own.

The similarity of features which he had at first noticed in his two sitters was at times almost forgotten; at others it had recurred to him and haunted him like a nightmare. More than once he had imagined he saw the fleeting something in one woman that reminded him of the other. He had dallied over the portraits, making them photographically minute for comparison. He had hesitated guiltily about showing either of these to the other woman. He had sometimes longed, and always dreaded, to see them side by side in person. They did not always come at their appointed time, and he was in constant terror lest they should meet in the studio; and yet the thought had in it a fascination for him that made him feverish for its realization. It was strange that they had never met in his rooms—he did not realize, perhaps, how strange.