Ernest
Carnegie, you can't look me straight in the face and tell me that you
wouldn't have acted exactly as I did." That terrible unspoken truth, long known, but never confessed, even to
himself, struck like a knife on Ernest's heart. He raised his hat
blindly, and walked with unsteady steps out of the sick-room. At that
moment, his own conscience smote him with awful vividness. Looking into
the inmost recesses of his angry heart, he felt with a shudder that
Harold had spoken the simple truth, and he dared not lie by
contradicting him. In Harold's place he would have done exactly as
Harold did! And that was just what made his deathless anger burn all the
more fiercely and fervidly against his brother! Groping his way down the stairs alone in a stunned and dazzled fashion,
Ernest Carnegie went home in his agony to his lonely lodgings, and sat
there solitary with his own tempestuous thoughts for the next
eight-and-forty hours. He did not undress or lie down to sleep, though
he dozed a little at times uneasily in his big arm-chair; he did not eat
or drink much; he merely paced up and down his room feverishly, and sent
his boy round at intervals of an hour or two to know how the doctor
thought Mr. Harold Carnegie was getting on. The boy returned every time
with uniformly worse and worse reports. Ernest rubbed his hands in
horrid exultation: "Ah," he said to himself, eagerly, "he will die! he
will die! he will pay the penalty of his dirty treachery! He has brought
it all upon himself by marrying that wicked woman! He deserves it every
bit for his mean conduct." On the third morning, Edie came round again, this time with her mother. Both had tears in their eyes, and they implored Ernest with sobs and
entreaties to come round and see Harold once more before he died. Harold
was raving and crying for him in his weakness and delirium. But Ernest
was like adamant. He would not go to see him, he said, not if they went
down bodily on their knees before him. At midday, the boy went again, and stayed a little longer than usual. When he returned, he brought back word that Mr. Harold Carnegie had died
just as the clock was striking the hour. Ernest listened with a look of
terror and dismay, and then broke down into a terrible fit of sobbing
and weeping. When Edie came round a little later to tell him that all
was over, she found him crying like a child in his own easy chair, and
muttering to himself in a broken fashion how dearly he and Harold had
loved one another years ago, when they were both happy children
together. Edie took him round to his brother's house, and there, over the deaf and
blind face that lay cold upon the pillows, he cried the cry that he
would not cry over his living, imploring brother. "Oh, Harold, Harold,"
he groaned in his broken agony, "I forgive you, I forgive you. I too
sinned as you did. What you would do, I would do. It was bound up in
both our natures. In your place I would have done as you did. But now
the curse of Cain is upon me! A worse curse than Cain's is upon me! I
have more than killed my brother!" For a day or two Ernest went back, heart-broken, to his father's house,
and slept once more in the old room where he used to sleep so long, next
door to Harold's. At the end of three days, he woke once from one of his
short snatches of sleep with a strange fluttering feeling in his left
side. He knew in a moment what it was. It was the same disease that
Harold had died of. "Thank Heaven!" he said to himself eagerly, "thank Heaven, thank Heaven
for that! Then I didn't wholly kill him! His blood isn't all upon my
poor unhappy head. After all, his marriage didn't quite upset the
harmony of the two clocks; it only made the slower one catch up for a
while and pass the faster. I'm a fortnight later in striking than Harold
this time; that's all. In three days more the clock will run down, and I
shall die as he did." And, true to time, in three days more, as the clock struck twelve,
Ernest Carnegie died as his brother Harold had done before him, with the
agonized cry for forgiveness trembling on his fevered lips--who knows
whether answered or unanswered? _OLGA DAVIDOFF'S HUSBAND._


I.

Tobolsk, though a Siberian metropolis, is really a very pleasant place
to pass a winter in. Like the western American cities, where everybody
has made his money easily and spends it easily, it positively bubbles
over with bad champagne, cheap culture, advanced thought, French
romances, and all the other most recent products of human industry and
ingenuity. Everybody eats _pâté de foie gras_, quotes Hartmann and
Herbert Spencer, uses electric bells, believes in woman's rights,
possesses profound views about the future of Asia, and had a grandfather
who was a savage Samoyede or an ignorant Buriat. Society is extremely
cultivated, and if you scratch it ever so little, you see the Tartar. Nevertheless, it considers itself the only really polite and enlightened
community on the whole face of this evolving terrestrial planet. The Davidoffs, however, who belonged to the most advanced section of
mercantile society in all Tobolsk, were not originally Siberians, or
even Russians, by birth or nationality. Old Mr. Davidoff, the
grandfather, who founded the fortunes of the family in St. Petersburg,
was a Welsh Davids; and he had altered his name by the timely addition
of a Slavonic suffix in order to conciliate the national
susceptibilities of Orthodox Russia. His son, Dimitri, whom for the
same reason he had christened in honour of a Russian saint, removed the
Russian branch of the house to Tobolsk (they were in the Siberian
fur-trade), and there marrying a German lady of the name of Freytag, had
one daughter and heiress, Olga Davidoff, the acknowledged belle of
Tobolskan society. It was generally understood in Tobolsk that the
Davidoffs were descended from Welsh princes (as may very likely have
been the case--though one would really like to know what has become of
all the descendants of Welsh subjects), if indeed they were not even
remotely connected with the Prince of Wales himself in person. The winter of 1873 (as everybody will remember) was a very cold one
throughout Siberia. The rivers froze unusually early, and troikas had
entirely superseded torosses on all the roads as early as the very
beginning of October. Still, Tobolsk was exceedingly gay for all that;
in the warm houses of the great merchants, with their tropical plants
kept at summer heat by stoves and flues all the year round, nobody
noticed the exceptional rigour of that severe season. Balls and dances
followed one another in quick succession, and Olga Davidoff, just
twenty, enjoyed herself as she had never before done in all her
lifetime. It was such a change to come to the concentrated gaities and
delights of Tobolsk after six years of old Miss Waterlow's Establishment
for Young Ladies, at The Laurels, Clapham. That winter, for the first time, Baron Niaz, the Buriat, came to
Tobolsk.