Arlo Bates - The Intoxicated Ghost, and other stories

Fanny’s characteristically feminine manner of calling her brother was to dash into his room, crying: —

“Oh, Arthur, Irene has found the McHugh diamonds!”

She was too incoherent to reply to his questions, so that there was manifestly nothing for him to do but to follow to the place where Irene was awaiting them. There the young couple were deserted by Fanny, who impulsively ran on before to the haunted chamber, leaving them to follow. As they walked along the corridor, the lieutenant, who perhaps felt that it was well not to provoke a discussion which might call up too vividly in Irene’s mind the humiliation of the afternoon, clasped her quite without warning, and drew her to his side.

“Now I can ask you to marry me,” he said; “and I love you, Irene, with my whole heart.”

Her first movement was an instinctive struggle to free herself; but the persuasion of his embrace was too sweet to be resisted, and she only protested by saying, “Your love seems to depend very much upon those detestable old diamonds.”

“Of course,” he answered. “Without them I am too poor to have any right to think of you.”

“Oh,” she cried out in sudden terror, “suppose that they are not there!”

The young man loosened his embrace in astonishment.

“Not there!” he repeated. “Fanny said that you had found them.”

“Not yet; only the ghost – ”

“The ghost!” he echoed, in tones of mingled disappointment and chagrin. “Is that all there is to it?”

Irene felt that her golden love-dream was rudely shattered. She was aware that the lieutenant did not even believe in the existence of the wraith of the major, and although she had been conversing with the spirit for so long a time that very night, so great was the influence of her lover over her mind that she began at this moment to doubt the reality of the apparition herself.

With pale face and sinking heart she led the way into her chamber, and to the corner where the paper-knife yet lay upon the floor in testimony of the actuality of her interview with the wraith. Under her directions the panel was removed from the wainscot, a labor which was not effected without a good deal of difficulty. Arthur sneered at the whole thing, but he yet was good-natured enough to do what the girls asked of him.

Only the dust of centuries rewarded their search. When it was fully established that there were no jewel-cases there, poor Irene broke down entirely, and burst into convulsive weeping.

“There, there,” Arthur said soothingly. “Don’t feel like that. We’ve got on without the diamonds thus far, and we can still.”

“It is 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.

“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.