University of Virginia Library

25. XXV.

WHEN I came to myself I was lying on my back in the grass, and I felt all through my body a dull ache as if after a heavy fall. Morning flickered in the sky. I could clearly distinguish my surroundings. Not far off there was a willow-fringed road that ran beside a birch wood. The region seemed familiar. I began to recall what had happened to me, and could not repress a shudder as I remembered the last awful spectacle.

"But what can have terrified Ellis?" I thought. "Can she be subject to his power? Is she not immortal? How is it possible that she can be doomed to annihilation?"

A low moan sounded not far away. I hastily turned my head in that direction, and there, two paces from me, lay the motionless form of a young woman in a white garment, with thick, unbound hair, and shoulders bared. One arm was over head, the other had fallen across her bosom, the eyelids were closed, and the tightly-compressed lips were stained slightly with a reddish froth. Could it be Ellis? But Ellis was a ghost, and it was a real woman whom I saw. I crawled over to her and bent above her. "Ellis, is it you?" I cried. The eyelids quivered, slowly uplifted; dark, expressive eyes fixed themselves earnestly on my face, and in the next instant a warm, moist, fragrant mouth was pressed to mine, slender, strong arms clasped themselves round my neck, a hot breast swelled against my own. "Farewell! farewell!" the dying voice said, and everything disappeared.

I staggered to my feet like a drunken man, passed my hand across my forehead, and looked about me. I found myself on the —schen road, two versts from my country-seat. Before I reached home the sun had risen.

For some nights following this I waited, let me confess it, not altogether without fear, for the return of my companion, but she came no more. One evening, indeed, I stationed myself at the old place, at the old hour, but nothing unusual occurred. After all, I could not regret the end of so singular an intimacy. I pondered much and earnestly upon this inexplicable, incomprehensible experience, and had to come to the conclusion that not only positive science is in no condition to handle it, but that it is out of the range of legends and fairy tales even. Indeed, what was Ellis? A ghost, a wandering soul, an evil spirit, a sylph, a vampire, finally? At times the fancy possessed me that Ellis was in truth a woman whom I had known; and I ransacked my memory to find where I might have seen her before. Hold! a moment more and I have it! But it never came. Everything grew confused like a dream. Yes, I have thought much and, as is very often the case, have arrived at no conclusion. I could not bring myself to ask the advice or the opinion of others, for fear of being taken for a madman. At last I gave up all my gropings; to tell the truth, I had other things to think of. First, the emancipation of the serfs and the equal distribution of lands, etc., intervened; then the condition of my health, that has received a shock; I have pain in my chest, cough much, and suffer from sleeplessness. I am visibly growing thin. I am as yellow as a mummy. The doctor assures me that I suffer from consumption of the blood, calls my complaint by a Greek name, "anæmie," and declares that I must go to Gastein.