The ghost stood over me, impending like a doom. Then it suddenly
looked towards the door, startled, and the door swung on its hinges. A
girl entered--a girl dressed in black, her shoulders and bosom
gleaming white against the dark attire, a young girl with the
heavenliest face on this earth. Casting herself on her knees before
the apparition, she raised to that dreadful spectre her countenance
transfigured by the ecstasy of a sublime appeal. It was Rosa.
Can I describe what followed? Not adequately, only by imperfect hints.
These two faced each other, Rosa and the apparition. She uttered no
word. But I, in my stupor, knew that she was interceding with the
spectre for my life. Her lovely eyes spoke to it of its old love, its
old magnanimity, and in the name of that love and that magnanimity
called upon it to renounce the horrible vengeance of which I was the
victim.
For long the spectre gazed with stern and formidable impassivity upon
the girl. I trembled, all hope and all despair, for the issue. She
would not be vanquished. Her love was stronger than its hate; her love
knew not the name of fear. For a thousand nights, so it seemed, the
two remained thus, at grips, as it were, in a death-struggle. Then
with a reluctant gesture of abdication the ghost waved a hand; its
terrible features softened into a consent, and slowly it faded away.
As I lay there Rosa bent over me, and put her arms round my neck, and
I could feel on my face the caress of her hair, and the warm baptism
of her tears--tears of joy.
* * * * *
I raised her gently. I laid her on the sofa, and with a calm, blissful
expectancy awaited the moment when her eyes should open. Ah! I may not
set down here the sensation of relief which spread through my being as I
realized with every separate brain-cell that I was no longer a victim,
the doomed slave of an evil and implacable power, but a free man--free
to live, free to love, exempt from the atrocious influences of the
nether sphere. I saw that ever since the first encounter in Oxford
Street my existence had been under a shadow, dark and malign and always
deepening, and that this shadow was now magically dissipated in the
exquisite dawn of a new day. And I gave thanks, not only to Fate, but to
the divine girl who in one of those inspirations accorded only to
genius had conceived the method of my enfranchisement, and so nobly
carried it out.
Her eyelids wavered, and she looked at me.