And one other picture--of Louis, cringing behind the bars of his cell, denied the privilege of visiting his wife’s bedside--crushed, dreading the hourly announcement of her death--filled with unspeakable horror of himself.
Velma still lived. The bullet had pierced her left lung and life hung by a tenuous thread. Hovering near I watched with dispassionate interest the battle for life. For the time I seemed emotionally spent. I had made a supreme effort--events would now take their inevitable course and show whether I had accomplished my purpose. I felt neither anxious nor overjoyed, neither regretful nor triumphant--merely impersonally curious.
A fever set in lessening Velma’s slender chances of recovery. In her delirium, her thoughts seemed always of Louis. Sometimes she breathed his name pleadingly, tenderly, then cried out in terror at some fleeting rehearsal of the scene in which he stood before her, the glitter of insanity in his eyes, the leveled revolver in his hand. Again she pleaded with him to give up his work at the bank; and at other times she seemed to think of him as over on the battlefields of Europe.
Only once did she apparently think of me--when she whispered the name by which I had called her, “_Winkie!_” and added, “_Dick!_” But, save for this exception, it was always “Louis! Louis!”
Her constant reiteration of his name finally dispelled the apathy of my spirit.
_Louis!_ All the vengeful fury toward him I had experienced when my soul went hurtling into the region of the disembodied returned with thwarted intensity.
When Velma’s fever subsided, when the long fight for recovery began and she fluttered from the borderland back into the realm of the physical, when I knew I had failed--balked of my prey, I had at least this satisfaction:
Never again would these two--the man I hated and the woman for whom I hungered--never again would they be to each other as they had been in the past. The perfection of their love had been irretrievably marred. Never would she meet his gaze without an inward shrinking. Always on his part--on both their parts--there would be an undercurrent of fear that the incident might recur--a grizzly menace, poisoning each moment of their lives together.
I had not schemed and contrived--and dared--in vain.
This was the thought I hugged when Louis was released from jail, upon her refusal to prosecute. It caused me sardonic amusement when, in their first embrace, the tears of despair rained down their cheeks. It recurred when they began their pitiful attempt to build anew on the shattered foundation of love.
And then--creepingly, slyly, like a bird of ill omen casting the shadow of its silent wings over the landscape--came retribution.
Many times, in retrospect, I lived over that brief hour of my return to physical expression--my hour of realization. Wraithlike, arose a vision of Velma--Velma as she had stood before me that night, staring at me with horror. I saw the horror deepen--deepen to abject despair.
How beautiful she had looked! But when I tried to picture that beauty, I could recall only her eyes. It mattered not whether I wished to see them--they filled my vision.
They seemed to haunt me. From being vaguely conscious of them, I became acutely so. Disconcertingly, they looked out at me from everywhere--eyes brimming with fear--eyes fixed and staring--filled with horrified accusation.
The beauty I had once coveted became a thing forbidden, even in memory. If I sought to peer through the veil as formerly--to witness her pathetic attempts to resume the old life with Louis--again those eyes!
It may perhaps sound strange for a disembodied creature--one whom you would call a ghost--to wail of being haunted. Yet haunting is of the spirit, and we of the spirit world are immeasurably more subject to its conditions than those whose consciousness is centered in the material sphere.
God! Those eyes. There is a refinement of physical torture which consists of allowing water to fall, drop by drop, for an eternity of hours, upon the forehead of the victim. Conceive of this torture increased a thousandfold, and a faint idea may be gained of the torture that was mine--from seeing everywhere, constantly, interminably, two orbs ever filled with the same expression of horror and reproach.
Much have I learned since entering the Land of the Shades. At that time I did not know, as I know now, that my punishment was no affliction from without, but the simple result of natural law. Causes set in motion must work out their full reaction. The pebble, cast into a quiet pool, makes ripples which in time return to the place of their origin. I had cast more than a pebble of disturbance into the harmony of human life, and through my intense preoccupation in a single aim had delayed longer than usual the reaction, I created for myself a hell. Inevitably I was drawn into it.
Gone was every desire I had known to hover near the two who had so long engrossed my attention. Haunted, harried, scourged by those dreadful accusers, I sought to fly from them to the ends of the earth. There was no escape, yet, driven frantic, I still struggled to escape, because that is the blind impulse of suffering creatures.
The emotions that had so swayed me when I tried to blast the lives of two who held me dear now seemed puny and insignificant in comparison with my suffering. No physical torment can be likened to that which engulfed me until my very being was but a seething mass of agony. Through it, I hurled maledictions upon the world, upon myself, upon the creator. Horrible blasphemies I uttered.
And, at last--I prayed.
It was but a cry for mercy--the inarticulate appeal of a tortured soul for surcease of pain--but suddenly a peace seemed to have come upon the universe.
Bereft of suffering, I felt like one who has ceased to exist.
Out of the silence came a wordless response. It beat upon my consciousness like the buffeting of the waves.
Words known to human ears would not convey the meaning of the message that was borne upon me--whether from outside source or welling up from within, I do not know. All I know is that it filled me with a strange hope.
A thousand years or a single instant--for time is a relative thing--the respite lasted. Then, I sank, as it seemed, to the old level of consciousness, and the torment was renewed.
Endure it now I knew that I must--and why. A strange new purpose filled my being. The light of understanding had dawned upon my soul.
And so I came to resume my vigil in the home of Velma and Louis.
_IX._
A brave heart was Velma’s--dauntless and true.
With the effects of the tragedy still apparent in her pallor and weakness, and in the shaken demeanor and furtive, self-distrustful attitude of Louis, she yet succeeded in finding a place for him as overseer of a small country estate.
I have said that I ceased to feel the torment of passion for Velma in the greater torment of her reproach. Ah! but I had never ceased to love her. As I now realized, I had desecrated that love, had transmuted it into a horrible travesty, had, in my abysmal ignorance, sought to obtain what I desired by destroying it; yet, beneath all, I had loved.
Well I know, now, that had I succeeded in my intention toward her, Velma would have ascended to a sphere utterly beyond my comprehension. Merciful fate had diverted my aim--had made possible some faint restitution.
I returned to Velma, loving her with a love that had come into its own, a love unselfish, untainted by thought of possession.
But, to help her, I must again hurt her cruelly.
Out of the chaos of her life she had slowly restored a semblance of harmony. Almost she succeeded in convincing Louis that their old peaceful companionship had returned; but to one who could read her thoughts, the nightmare thing that hovered between them weighed cruelly upon her soul.
She was never quite able to look into her husband’s eyes without a lurking suspicion of what might lie in their depths; never able to compose herself for sleep without a tremor lest she should wake to find herself confronted by a fiend in his form. I had done my work only too well!
Now, slowly and inexorably, I began again undermining Louis’ mental control. The old ground must be traversed anew, because he had gained in strength from the respite I had allowed him, and his outdoor life gave him a mental vigor with which I had not been obliged to contend before. On the other hand, I was equipped with new knowledge of the power I intended to wield.
I shall not relate again the successive stages by which I succeeded, first in influencing his will, then in partially subduing it, and, finally, in driving his personality into the background for indefinite periods. The terror that overwhelmed him when he realized that he was becoming a prey to his former aberrations may be imagined.
To shield Velma, I performed my experiments, when possible, while he was away from her. But she could not long be unaware of the moodiness, the haggard droop of his shoulders which accompanied his realization that the old malady had returned. The deepening terror in her expression was like a scourge upon my spirit--but I must wound her in order to cure.