Like the dead bishop,he had become a free spirit.His prayer was answered,and his body,struck by lightning,lay far away on that great ringed planet.How he longed to take in his arms the girl who had promised herself to him,and who,he now saw,loved him with her whole heart;but he was only an immaterial spirit,lighter even than the ether of space,and the unchangeable laws of the universe seemed to him but the irony of fate.As a spirit,he was intangible and invisible to those in the flesh,and likewise they were beyond his control.The tragedy of life then dawned upon him,and the awful results of death made themselves felt.He glanced at Sylvia.On coming in she had looked radiantly happy;now she seemed depressed,and even the bird stopped singing.
"Oh,"he thought,"could I but return to life for one hour,to tell her how incessantly she has been in my thoughts,and how Ilove her!Death,to the aged,is no loss--in fact,a blessing--but now!"and he sobbed mentally in the anguish of his soul.If he could but communicate with her,he thought;but he remembered what the departed bishop had said,that it would take most men centuries to do this,and that others could never learn.
By that time she,too,would be dead,perhaps having been the wife of some one else,and he felt a sense of jealousy even beyond the grave.Throwing himself upon a rug on the floor,in a paroxysm of distress,he gazed at Sylvia.
"Oh,horrible mockery!"he thought,thinking of the spirit."He gave me worse than a stone when I asked for bread;for,in place of freedom,he sent me death.Could I but be alive again for a few moments!"But,with a bitter smile,he again remembered the words of the bishop,"What would a soul in hell not give for but one hour on earth?"Sylvia had seated herself on a small sofa,on which,and next to her,he had so often sat.Her gentle eyes had a thoughtful look,while her face was the personification of intelligence and beauty.She occasionally glanced at his photograph,which she held in her hand.
"Sylvia,Sylvia!"he suddenly cried,rising to his knees at her feet."I love,I adore you!It was my longing to be with you that brought me here.I know you can neither see nor hear me,but cannot your soul commune with mine?""Is Dick here?"cried Sylvia,becoming deadly pale and getting up,"or am I losing my reason?"Seeing that she was distressed by the power of his mind,Ayrault once more sank to the floor,burying his face in his hands.
Unable to endure this longer,and feeling as if his heart must break,he rushed out into the street,wishing he might soothe his anguish with a hypodermic injection of morphine,and that he had a body with which to divert and suppress his soul.
Night had fallen,and the electric lamps cast their white rays on the ground,while the stars overhead shone in their eternal serenity and calm.Then was it once more brought home to him that he was a spirit,for darkness and light were alike,and he felt the beginning of that sense of prescience of which the bishop had spoken.Passing through the houses of some of the clubs to which he belonged,he saw his name still upon the list of members,and then he went to the places of amusement he knew so well.On all sides were familiar faces,but what interested him most was the great division incessantly going on.Here were jolly people enjoying life and playing cards,who,his foresight showed him,would in less than a year be under ground--like Mercutio,in "Romeo and Juliet,"to-day known as merry fellows,who to-morrow would be grave men.
While his eyes beheld the sun,he had imagined the air felt warm and balmy.He now saw that this had been a hallucination,for he was chilled through and through.He also perceived that be cast no shadow,and that no one observed his presence.He,on the other hand,saw not only the air as it entered and left his friends'lungs,but also the substance of their brains,and the seeds of disease and death,whose presence they themselves did not even suspect,and the seventy-five per cent of water in their bodies,making them appear like sacks of liquid.In some he saw the germs of consumption;in others,affections of the heart.In all,he saw the incessant struggle between the healthy blood-cells and the malignant,omnipresent bacilli that the cells were trying to overcome.Many men and women he saw were in love,and he could tell what all were about to do.Oh,the secrets that were revealed,while the motives for acts were now laid bare that till then he had misunderstood!He had often heard the old saying,that if every person in a ball-room could read the thoughts of the rest,the ball would seem a travesty on enjoyment,rather than real pleasure,and now he perceived its force.He also noticed that many were better than he had supposed,and were trying,in a blundering but persevering way,to obey their consciences.He saw some unselfish thoughts and acts.Many things that he had attributed to irresolution or inconsistency,he perceived were in reality self-sacrifice.He went on in frantic disquiet,distance no longer being of consequence,and in his roaming chanced to pass through the graveyard in which many generations of his ancestors lay buried.
Within the leaden coffins he saw the cold remains;some well preserved,others but handfuls of dust.
"Tell me,O my progenitors,"he cried,"you whose blood till this morning flowed in my veins,is there not some way by which I,as a spirit,can commune with the material world?I have always admired your judgment and wisdom,and you have all been in Shadowland longer than I.Give me,I pray you,some ancestral advice."The only sound in answer was the hum of the insects that filled the evening air.The moonlight shone softly,but in a ghastly way,on the marble crosses of his vault and those around,and he felt an unspeakable sadness within this abode of the dead."How many unfinished lives,"he thought,"have ended beneath these sods!Unimproved talents here are buried in the ground.
