The Intoxicated Ghost, and other stories

“Post hoc sed non ergo propter hoc,” he said to himself, in the Latin of his school debating-society days; but secretly he believed that in this case the effect was no less “because” than “after.”

On the morning after Celia had talked with her betrothed about the picture, Ralph gave the artist a sitting. The young man seemed so preoccupied that Tom rallied him a little on his absence of mind, inquiring if Thatcher wished his portrait to have an air of deep abstraction.

“I was not thinking of that confounded old picture at all,” the young man responded, smiling. “I was merely – well, I do not know exactly how to tell you what I was doing. Do you ever feel as if the reflective part of you, whatever that may be, had gone into its office for private meditation and shut your consciousness outside?”

“Yes,” Tom answered; “and I always comfort myself for being excluded by supposing that at least something of real importance must be under consideration or it would n’t be worth the trouble to shut the doors so carefully.”

“Do you?” returned the sitter. “I had a jolly old clerical uncle who used to lock the door of his study and pretend to be writing the most awe-inspiring sermons, when he really was only having a well-fed nap. I am afraid,” he went on, with a sigh and a change of manner, “that there is little of real importance has ever gone on in my mind. Do you know, I am half inclined to hate you.”

The artist looked up in surprise.

“Hate me?” he echoed. “Why should you hate me?”

“Because you are everything that I am not; because you succeed in everything and I never did anything in my life; because at this poker-table of life you win and I lose.”

A strange tinge of bitterness showed itself in Ralph’s voice, and puzzled Claymore. It was not like Thatcher to be introspective, or to lament lost possibilities. The artist rubbed his brush on his palette with a thoughtful air.

“Even if that were so,” he said, “I don’t see exactly why you should vent your disappointment on me. I’m hardly to blame, am I? But of course what you say is nonsense anyway.”

“Nonsense? It is n’t nonsense. I’ve done nothing. I know nothing. I’m good for nothing; and the worst of it is that the girl I’ve wanted all my life realizes it just as well as I do. She is n’t a fool; and of course she does n’t care a rap about me.”

The confession was so frankly boyish that Claymore had a half-impulse to smile, but the feeling in it was too evidently genuine to be ignored. One thing at least was clear: Ralph was at last beginning to be dissatisfied with his idle, purposeless life. He had come to the enlightenment of seeing himself as he might look to the eyes of the woman he cared for. The reflection crossed Claymore’s mind that some disappointment in love might have brought about whatever change he had observed in his sitter, and that any influence which he had ascribed to the portrait had in reality come from this. The thought struck him with a ludicrous sense of having befooled himself. It was as if some gorgeous palace of fancy, carefully built up and elaborated, had come tumbling in ruins about his head. He made a gesture, half comic, half deprecatory, and laid down his palette.

“The light has changed,” he said. “I can’t paint any more to-day.”

III

Claymore was intensely imaginative, and he possessed all the sanguine disposition of the artistic temperament, the power of giving himself up to a dream so that it for the time being became real. Matters which the reason will without hesitation allow to be the lightest bubbles of fancy are to such a disposition almost as veracious fact; and often the life of an imaginative man is shaped by what to cold judgment is an untenable hypothesis. The artist had not in the least been conscious how strong a hold the idea of awakening Ralph Thatcher had taken upon his mind, until the doubt presented itself whether the portrait had in reality possessed any influence whatever. He was not without a sense of humor, and he smiled inwardly at the seriousness with which he regarded the matter. He reasoned with himself, half petulantly, half humorously; sometimes taking the ground that his theory had been merely a fantastic absurdity, and again holding doggedly to the belief that it was founded upon some fragment at least of vital truth. He recalled vaguely a good many scraps of modern beliefs in the power of suggestion; then he came back to the reflection that if Ralph was in love, no suggestion was needed to cause a mental revolution.

Wholly to disbelieve in its own inspirations is, however, hardly within the power of the genuinely imaginative nature. Whatever his understanding might argue, Tom, in the end, would have been false to his temperament had he not remained convinced that he was right in believing that to some degree, at least, the picture he was painting had influenced his sitter. Without any consciously defined plan, he got out a fresh canvas, and occupied himself, when alone in the studio, by copying Ralph’s head, but with a difference. As in the other picture he had endeavored to express all the noblest possibilities of the young man’s face, in this he labored to portray whatever potentiality of evil might be found there. Every introspective person has experienced the sensation of feeling that a course of action is being followed as if by some inner direction, yet without any clear consciousness of the reason; and much as might have come a hint of the intentions or motives of another person, came to Tom the thought that he was painting this second portrait that its difference from the first might show him upon what foundations rested his fanciful theory. He wished, he told himself, at least to see how far he had expressed a personality unlike another equally possible.

As a faint shade on the artist’s inner consciousness rested, however, a feeling that this explanation was not completely satisfactory. He would have been shocked had he even dreamed of the possibility that artistic vanity, aroused by the doubt that it possessed the power of moulding the life and destiny of Ralph, had defiantly turned to throw its influence into the other scale, to prove by its power of dragging the sitter down that its dominance was real. Had any realization of such a motive come to Claymore, he would have been horrified at a thought so evil; yet he failed to push self-investigation far enough to bring him to an understanding of his real motives.

The painter worked steadily and with almost feverish rapidity, and before the end of the week he was able to substitute the second portrait for the first when Ralph, who had been out of town for a few days, came for his next sitting. Tom was not without a good deal of uneasy secret curiosity in regard to the effect upon Thatcher of the changed picture. He appreciated how great the alteration really was, a difference so marked that he had lacked the courage to carry out his first intention of exhibiting the new canvas to Celia. He excused himself for hesitating to show her the portrait by the whimsical pretext that it would not be the part of a gentleman to betray the discreditable traits of character he believed himself to have discovered as among the possibilities of her cousin’s nature. What Ralph would himself say, the painter awaited with uneasy eagerness, and as the latter, after the customary greetings, walked up to the easel and stood regarding his counterfeit presentment, Tom found himself more nervous than he would have supposed possible.

Ralph studied the picture a moment in silence.

“What in the devil,” he burst out, “have you been doing to my picture?”

“What is the matter with it?” the artist asked, stepping beside him, and in turn fixing his gaze on the portrait.

“I’m sure I don’t know,” Ralph replied, with a puzzled air; “but somehow or other it seems to me to have changed from a rather decent-looking phiz into a most accursedly low-lived one. Do I look like that?”

“I suppose a mirror would give a more disinterested answer to that question than I could.”

Claymore glanced up as he spoke, and hardly repressed an exclamation of surprise. Ralph’s whole expression was changing to correspond with that of the portrait before him. Who has not, in looking at some portrait which strongly impressed him, found in a little time that his own countenance was unconsciously altering its expression to correspond with that portrayed before him; and the chances that such a thing will occur must be doubly great when the picture is one’s own image.

A portrait appeals so intimately to the personality of the person represented, human vanity and individuality insist so strongly upon regarding it as a part of self, that it stands in a closer relation to the inner being than can almost any other outward thing. It is, in a sense, part of the original, and perhaps the oriental prejudice against being portrayed, lest in the process the artist may obtain some sinister advantage, is founded upon some subtle truth. It can hardly be possible that, with the keen feeling every man must have in regard to his portrait, any one should fail to be more or less influenced by the painter’s conception of him, the visible embodiment of the impression he has made upon another human mind; and since every picture must contain something of the personality of the artist, it follows that a portrait-painter is sure to affect in some degree the character of his sitters. It would rarely happen that this influence would be either intentional or tangible, but must it not always exist?

Claymore stood for a little time watching Ralph’s face; then he walked away, and returned with a small mirror which he put in the latter’s hand. Thatcher looked at the reflection it offered him, and broke into a hard laugh.

“By George!” he said; “it does look like me. I never realized before that I was such a whelp.”

“Fiddlesticks!” Claymore rejoined briskly, taking the glass from him. “Don’t talk nonsense. Take your place and let’s get to work.”

IV

On the afternoon of the same day Celia came into the studio with her face clouded. She received her lover’s greetings in an absent-minded fashion, and almost before the musical tinkle of the zither on the door which admitted her had died away, she asked abruptly: —

“What in the world have you been doing to Ralph?”

“I? Nothing but painting him. Why?”

“Because he came down here this morning in a perfectly heavenly frame of mind. He has been in Boston to see about some repairs on his tenement-houses at the North End that I’ve been teasing him to make ever since the first of my being there last winter; and he came in this morning to say he thought I was right, and he was going to take hold and do what I wanted.”

“Well?” questioned Tom, as she broke off with a gesture of impatience.

“And after he ’d been down here for his sitting, he came back so cross and strange; and said he’d reconsidered, and he did n’t see why he should bother his head about the worthless wretches in the slums. I can’t see what came over him.”

“But why should you hold me responsible for your cousin’s vagaries?”

“Oh, of course you are not,” Celia replied, with a trace of petulance in her tone; “but I am so dreadfully disappointed. Ralph has always put the whole thing off before, and now I thought he had really waked up.”

“Probably,” Claymore suggested, “it is some new phase of his ill-starred love affair.”

Miss Sathman flushed to her temples.

“I do not know why you choose to say that,” she answered stiffly. “He never speaks to me of that now. He is too thoroughly a gentleman.”

“What!” Tom burst out, in genuine amazement. “Good heavens! It was n’t you?”

Celia looked at him in evident bewilderment.

“Did n’t you know?” she asked. “Ralph has been in love with me ever since we were in pinafores. I did n’t speak of it because it did n’t seem fair to him; but I supposed, of course, that was what you meant when you spoke. I even thought you might be jealous the least bit.”

Claymore turned away and walked down the studio on pretense of arranging a screen. He felt as if he had stabbed a rival in the back. Whether by his brush he had really an influence over Thatcher, or the changes in his sitter were merely coincidences, he had at least been trying to affect the young man, and since he now knew Ralph as the lover of Celia, his actions all at once took on a different character, and the second portrait seemed like a covert attack.

“Ralph is so amazingly outspoken,” Celia continued, advancing toward the easel and laying her hand on the cloth which hung before her cousin’s portrait, “that I wonder he has not told you. He is very fond of you, though, he naively says, he ought not to be.”

As she spoke, she lifted the curtain which hid the later portrait of Ralph. She uttered an exclamation which made Claymore, whose back had been turned, spring hastily toward her, too late to prevent her seeing the picture.

“Tom,” she cried, “what have you done to Ralph?”

The tone pierced Claymore to the quick. The words were almost those which Celia had used before, but now reproach, grief, and a depth of feeling which it seemed to Tom must come from a regard keener than either gave them a new intensity of meaning. The tears sprang to Miss Sathman’s eyes as she looked from the canvas to her lover.

“Oh, Tom,” she said, “how could you change it so? Ralph does not look like that.”

“No,” Claymore answered, his embarrassment giving to his voice a certain severity. “This is the reverse of the other picture. This is the evil possibility of his face.”

He recovered his composure. Despite his coldness of demeanor, there was a vein of intense jealousy in the painter’s nature, which tingled at the tone in which his betrothed spoke of her cousin. He had more than once said to himself that, despite the fact that Celia might be more demonstrative than he, his love for her was far stronger than hers for him. Now there came to him the conviction, quick and unreasonable, that although she might not be aware of it, her deepest affection was really given to Ralph Thatcher.

“Why did you paint it, Tom?” Celia pursued. “It is wicked. It really does not in the least resemble Ralph. I suppose you could take any face and distort it into wickedness. Where is the other picture?”

Without a word Tom brought the first portrait and set it beside the second. Celia regarded the two canvases in silence a moment. Her color deepened, and her throat swelled. Then she turned upon Claymore with eyes that flashed, despite the tears which sprang into them.

“You are wicked and cruel!” she said bitterly. “I hate you for doing it.”

Tom turned pale, and then laughed unmirthfully.

“You take it very much to heart,” he remarked.

The tears welled more hotly in her eyes. She tried in vain to check them, and then with a sob she turned and walked quickly from the studio, the zither tinkling, as the door closed after her, with a gay frivolity that jarred sharply on Tom Claymore’s nerves.

V

It was nearly a fortnight before Tom saw Celia again. For a day or two he kept away from her, waiting for some sign that her mood had softened and that she regretted her words. Then he could endure suspense no longer and called at the house, to discover that she had gone to the mountains for a brief visit. He remembered that he had been told of this journey, and he reflected that Celia might have expected him to come and bid her good-by. His mental attitude toward her had been much the same as if there had been some actual quarrel, and now he said to himself that, after all, there had been nothing in their last interview to justify this feeling. He alternately reproached himself and blamed her, and continually the condition of things became more intolerable to him.

His temper was not improved when Ralph, at one of the sittings, which continued steadily, mentioned in a tone which seemed to the artist’s jealous fancy rather boasting, that he had received a letter from his cousin. Tom frowned fiercely, and painted on without comment.

Claymore was working steadily on the second portrait, which was rapidly approaching completion. He said to himself that if his theory was right, and the reflection of his worst traits before a man’s eye could influence the original to evil, he would be avenged upon Ralph for robbing him of Celia, since this portrait of Thatcher was to have a place in the young man’s home. He also reflected that in no way else could he so surely wean Celia from an affection for her cousin, as by bringing out Ralph’s worst side. He despised himself for what he was doing, but as men sullenly yield to a temptation against which all their best instincts fight, he still went on with his work.

He naturally watched closely to see what effect the portrait was already having on his sitter. Whether from its influence or from other causes, Ralph had grown morose and ungracious after Celia’s departure, and Tom was certainly not mistaken in feeling that he was in the worst possible frame of mind. Even the fact that his cousin had written to him did little to change his mood, a fact that Tom, sore and hurt at being left without letters, noted with inward anger.

The two men were daily approaching that point where it was probable that they would come into open conflict. Ralph began to devise excuses for avoiding the sittings, a fact that especially irritated the artist, who was anxious to complete the work. The whole nature of their relations toward each other had undergone a change, and all frankness and friendliness seemed to have gone out of it. Sometimes Claymore felt responsible for this, and at others he laughed at the idea that he had in any way helped to alter Ralph. He was uneasy and unhappy, and when a couple of weeks had gone by without a word from Celia, he resolved that he would follow her to the mountains, and at least put an end to the suspense which was becoming intolerable.

He sent word to Thatcher that he was going out of town for a few days, packed his valise, and went down to his studio to put things to rights for his absence. He arranged the two or three matters that needed attention, looked at his watch, and found that he had something over an hour before train time. He started toward the door of the studio, hesitated, and then turned back to stand in front of the easel and regard the nearly completed portrait of Ralph Thatcher.

It was a handsome face that looked out at him, and one full of character; but in the full lips was an expression of sensuality almost painful, and the eyes were selfish and cruel. The artist’s first feeling was one of gratified vanity at the cleverness with which his work had been done. He had preserved the likeness, and scarcely increased the apparent age of his sitter, while he had carried forward into repulsive fullness the worst possibilities of which he could find trace in the countenance of the original. As he looked, a cruel sense of triumph grew in Claymore’s mind. He felt that this portrait was the sure instrument of his revenge against the man who had robbed him of the love of his betrothed. He considered his coming interview with Celia, and so completely was he possessed of the belief that he had lost her, that he looked forward to the meeting as to a farewell.

At the thought a sudden pulse of emotion thrilled him. He saw Celia’s beautiful, high-bred face before him, and there came into his mind a sense of shame, as if he were already before her and could not meet her eyes. The sting of the deepest humiliation a high-minded man can know, that of standing condemned and degraded in his own sight, pierced his very soul.

“It is myself and not Ralph that I have been harming,” ran his thought. “It has never occurred to me that, even if I was dragging him down, I had flung myself into the slime to do it. Good heavens! Is this the sort of man I am? Am I such a sneak as to lurk in the dark and take advantage of the confidence he shows by putting himself into my hands! Celia is right; she could not be herself and not prefer him to the blackguard I have proved myself.”

However fanciful his theory in regard to the effect of the portrait upon Thatcher might be, Tom was too honest to disguise from himself that his will and intention had been to do the other harm, and to do it, moreover, in an underhanded fashion. Instead of open, manly attack upon his rival, he had insidiously endeavored to work him injury against which Ralph could not defend himself.

“The only thing I have really accomplished,” groaned poor Tom to himself, “is to prove what a contemptible cur I am.”

He took from his pocket his knife, opened it, and approached the canvas. Then that strong personal connection between the artist and his work which makes its defense almost identical with the instinct of self-preservation, made him pause. For an instant he wavered, moved to preserve the canvas, although he hid it away; then with desperate resolution, and a fierceness not unlike a sacred fury, he cut the canvas into strips. So great was the excitement of his mood and act that he panted as he finished by wrenching the shreds of canvas from the stretcher.

Then he smiled at the extravagance of his feelings, set the empty stretcher against the wall, and once more brought to light the original portrait.

“There,” he said to himself, as he set the picture on the easel, “I can at least go to her with a decently clean conscience, if I am a fool.”

VI

It was well on toward sunset when Claymore reached the mountain village where Celia was staying with a party of friends. All the hours of his ride in the cars he had been reviewing his relations toward her. With his imaginative temperament he was sure to exaggerate the gravity of the situation, and he was firmly convinced that by the destruction of the portrait he had virtually renounced his betrothed. He recalled jealously the many signs Celia had given of her interest in her cousin, and he settled himself in the theory that only Ralph’s boyishness and apparent want of character had prevented her cousin from winning her love. Looking back over the summer and recalling how Thatcher had advanced in manliness, how his character had developed, and Celia’s constant appreciation of his progress, Claymore could not but conclude, with an inward groan, that although she was pledged to him, her affection was really given to his rival.

Whether Celia was aware of the true state of her feelings, Tom could not determine. Her silence of the last fortnight had perplexed and tormented him; and he felt sure that in this time she could not have failed to reflect deeply upon the situation. He believed, however whimsical such a theory might seem, that his only chance of holding her was by bringing home to her the dark side of Ralph’s character, as he was convinced he had been the means of showing her the best traits of her cousin. The effect of the portraits had become to him a very real and a very important factor in the case, and although he was at heart too good to regret that he had destroyed the second picture, he was not without a feeling of self-pity that fate had forced upon him the destruction of his own hopes. The logical reflection that, if his ideas were true, he had himself chosen to take up the weapon by which he was in the end wounded, did not occur to him, and would probably have afforded him small consolation if it had.

A servant directed him down a wood-path which led to a small cascade, where he was told he should find Miss Sathman. As he came within sound of the falling water, he heard voices, and pressing on, he was suddenly brought to an abrupt halt by recognizing the tones of Ralph Thatcher. What the young man was saying Tom did not catch, but the reply of Celia came to his ears with cutting distinctness.

“And does it seem to you honorable, Ralph,” she said, “to follow me here and talk to me in this way, when you know I am engaged to another man, and he your friend?”

“No man is my friend that takes you away from me!” Thatcher returned hotly. “And besides, I happen to know you have quarrelled with him. You have n’t written to him since you came here.”

“I have not quarrelled with him,” Celia answered. “Oh, Ralph, I have always believed you were so honorable.”

“Honorable! honorable!” repeated the other angrily. “Shall I let you go for a whimsical fancy that it is not honorable to speak to you? I have loved you ever since we were children, and you – ”

“And I,” Miss Sathman interrupted, “have never loved anybody in that way but Tom.”

The woodland swam before Claymore’s eyes. Instinctively, and hardly conscious what he was doing, he drew himself aside out of the path into the thicket. What more was said, he did not know. He was only aware that a moment or two later Ralph went alone by the place where he lay hidden, and then he rose and went slowly toward the cascade and Celia.