Laurie left chambers as it was growing dark that afternoon, and went
back to his rooms for tea. He had passed, as was usual now, an
extremely distracted couple of hours, sitting over his books with
spasmodic efforts only to attend to them. He was beginning, in fact,
to be not quite sure whether Law after all was his vocation....
His kettle was singing pleasantly on the hob, and a tray glimmered in
the firelight on the little table, as the woman had left it; and it
was not until he had poured himself out a cup of tea that he saw on
the white cloth an envelope, directed to him, inscribed "By hand," in
the usual handwriting of persons engaged in business. Even then he did
not open it at once; it was probably only some note connected with his
chief's affairs.
For half an hour more he sat on, smoking after tea, pondering that
which was always in his mind now, and dwelling with a vague pleasant
expectancy on what Sunday night should bring forth. Mr. Vincent, he
knew, was returning to town that afternoon. Perhaps, even, he might
look in for a few minutes, if there were any last instructions to be
given.
The effect of the medium on the young man's mind had increased
enormously during these past weeks. That air of virile masterfulness,
all the more impressive because of its extreme quiet assurance, had
proved even more deep than had at first appeared.
It is very hard to analyze the elements of a boy's adoration for a
solid middle-aged gentleman with a "personality"; yet the thing is an
enormously potent fact, and plays at least as big a part in the
sub-currents that run about the world as any more normal human
emotions. Psychologists of the materialistic school would probably say
that it was a survival of the tribe-and-war instinct. At any rate,
there it is.
Added to all this was the peculiar relation in which the medium stood
to the boy; it was he who had first opened the door towards that
strange other world that so persistently haunts the imaginations of
certain temperaments; it was through him that Laurie had had brought
before the evidence of his senses, as he thought, the actuality of the
things of which he had dreamed--an actuality which his religion had
somehow succeeded in evading. It was not that Laurie had been
insincere in his religion; there had been moments, and there still
were, occasionally, when the world that the Catholic religion preached
by word and symbol and sacrament, became apparent; but the whole thing
was upon a different plane. Religion bade him approach in one way,
spiritualism in the other. The senses had nothing to do with one; they
were the only ultimate channels of the other. And it is
extraordinarily easy for human beings to regard as more fundamentally
real the evidence of the senses than the evidence of faith....
Here then were the two choices--a world of spirit, to be taken largely
on trust, to be discerned only in shadow and outline upon rare and
unusual occasions of exaltation, of a particular quality which had
almost lost its appeal; and a world of spirit that took shape and form
and practical intelligibility, in ordinary rooms and under very nearly
ordinary circumstances--a world, in short, not of a transcendent God
and the spirits of just men made perfect, of vast dogmas and theories,
but of a familiar atmosphere, impregnated with experience, inhabited
by known souls who in this method or that made themselves apparent to
those senses which, Laurie believed, could not lie.... And the point
of contact was Amy Nugent herself....
As regards his exact attitude to this girl it is more difficult to
write. On the one side the human element--those associations directly
connected with the senses--her actual face and hands, physical
atmosphere and surroundings--those had disappeared; they were
dispersed, or they lay underground; and it had been with a certain
shock of surprise, in spite of the explanations given to him, that he
had seen what he believed to be her face in the drawing-room in
Queen's Gate. But he had tried to arrange all this in his
imagination, and it had fallen into shape and proportion again. In
short, he thought he understood now that it is character which gives
unity to the transient qualities of a person on earth, and that, when
those qualities disappear, it is as unimportant as the wasting of
tissue: when, according to the spiritualists' gospel that character
manifests itself from the other side, it naturally reconstitutes the
form by which it had been recognized on earth.
Yet, in spite of this sense of familiarity with what he had seen,
there had fallen between Amy and himself that august shadow that is
called Death.... And in spite of the assurances he had received, even
at the hands of his own senses, that this was indeed the same girl
that he had known on earth, there was a strange awe mingled with his
old rather shallow passion. There were moments, as he sat alone in his
rooms at night, when it rose almost to terror; just as there were
other moments when awe vanished for a while, and his whole being was
flooded with an extraordinary ecstatic semi-earthly happiness at the
thought that he and she could yet speak with one another.... Imagine,
if you please, a child who on returning home finds that his mother has
become Queen, and meets her in the glory of ermine and diadem....
But the real deciding point--which, somehow, he knew must come--the
moment at which these conflicting notes should become a chord, was
fixed for Sunday evening next. Up to now he had had evidence of her
presence, he had received intelligible messages, though fragmentary
and half stammered through the mysterious veil, he had for an instant
or two looked upon her face; but the real point, he hoped, would come
in two days. The public _séances_ had not impressed him. He had been
to three or four of these in a certain road off Baker Street, and had
been astonished and disappointed. The kind of people that he had met
there--sentimental bourgeois with less power of sifting evidence than
the average child, with a credulity that was almost supernatural--the
medium, a stout woman who rolled her eyes and had damp fat fingers;
the hymn-singing, the wheezy harmonium, the amazing pseudo-mystical
oracular messages that revealed nothing which a religiose fool could
not invent--in fact the whole affair, from the sham stained-glass
lamp-shade to the ghostly tambourines overhead, the puerility of the
tricks played on the inquirers, and all the rest of it--this seemed as
little connected with what he had experienced with Mr. Vincent as a
dervish dance with High Mass. He had reflected with almost ludicrous
horror upon the impression it would make on Maggie, and the remarks it
would elicit.
But this other engagement was a very different matter.
They were going to attempt a further advance. It had, indeed, been
explained to him that these attempts were but tentative and
experimental; it was impossible to dictate exactly what should fall;
but the object on Sunday night was to go a step further, and to bring
about, if possible, the materialization process to such a point that
the figure could be handled, and could speak. And it seemed to Laurie
as if this would be final indeed....
* * * * *
So he sat this evening, within forty-eight hours of the crisis,
thinking steadily. Half a dozen times, perhaps, the thought of Maggie
recurred to him; but he was learning how to get rid of that.
Then he took up the note and opened it. It was filled with four pages
of writing. He turned to the end and read the signature. Then he
turned back and read the whole letter.
* * * * *
It was very quiet as he sat there thinking over what he had read. The
noise of Fleet Street came up here only as the soothing murmur of the
sea upon a beach; and he himself sat motionless, the firelight falling
upwards upon his young face, his eyes, and his curly hair. About him
stood his familiar furniture, the grand piano a pool of glimmering
dark wood in the background, the tall curtained windows suggestive of
shelter and warmth and protection.
Yet, if he had but known it, he was making an enormous choice. The
letter was from the man he had met at midday, and he was deciding how
to answer it. He was soothed and quieted by his loneliness, and his
irritation had disappeared: he regarded the letter from a youthfully
philosophical standpoint, pleased with his moderation, as the work of
a fanatic; he was considering only whether he would yield, for
politeness' sake, to the importunity, or answer shortly and
decisively. It seemed to him remarkable that a mature and experienced
man could write such a letter.
At last he got up, went to his writing-table, and sat down. Still he
hesitated for a minute; then he dipped his pen and wrote.
When he had finished and directed it, he went back to the fire. He had
an hour yet in which to think and think before he need dress. He had
promised to dine with Mrs. Stapleton at half-past seven. He had a
touch of headache, and perhaps might sleep it off.
_Chapter XII_
I
Lady Laura crossed the road by Knightsbridge Barracks and turned again
homewards through the Park.
It was one of those days that occasionally fall in late February which
almost cheer the beholder into a belief that spring has really begun.
Overhead the sky was a clear pale blue, flecked with summer-looking
clouds, gauzy and white; beneath, the whole earth was waking drowsily
from a frost so slight as only to emphasize the essential softness of
the day that followed: the crocuses were alight in the grass, and an
indescribable tint lay over all that had life, like the flush in the
face of an awakening child. But these days are too good to last, and
Lady Laura, who had looked at the forecast of a Sunday paper, had
determined to take her exercise immediately after church.
She had come out not long before from All Saints'; she had listened to
an excellent though unexciting sermon and some extremely beautiful
singing; and even now, saturated with that atmosphere and with the
soothing physical air in which she walked, her anxieties seemed less
acute. There were enough of her acquaintances, too, in groups here and
there--she had to bow and smile sufficiently often--to prevent these
anxieties from reasserting themselves too forcibly. And it may be
supposed that not a creature who observed her, in her exceedingly
graceful hat and mantle, with her fair head a little on one side, and
her gold-rimmed pince-nez delicately gleaming in the sunlight, had the
very faintest suspicion that she had any anxieties at all.
Yet she felt strangely unwilling even to go home.
The men were to set about clearing the drawing-room while she was at
church; and somehow the thought that it would be done when she got
home, that the temple would, so to speak, be cleared for sacrifice,
was a distasteful one.
She did not quite know when the change had begun; in fact, she was
scarcely yet aware that there was a change at all. Upon one point only
her attention fixed itself, and that was the increasing desire she
felt that Laurie Baxter should go no further in his researches under
her auspices.
Up to within a few weeks ago she had been all ardor. It had seemed to
her, as has been said, that the apparent results of spiritualism were
all to the good, that they were in no point contrary to the religion
she happened to believe--in fact, that they made real, as does an
actual tree in the foreground of a panorama, the rather misty sky and
hills of Christianity. She had even called them very "teaching."
It was about eighteen months since she had first taken this up under
the onslaught of Mrs. Stapleton's enthusiasm; but things had not been
as satisfactory as she wished, until Mr. Vincent had appeared. Then
indeed matters had moved forward; she had seen extraordinary things,
and the effect of them had been doubled by the medium's obvious
honesty and his strong personality. He was to her as a resolute priest
to a timid penitent; he had led her forward, supported by his own
conviction and his extremely steady will, until she had begun to feel
at home in this amazing new world, and eager to make proselytes.
Then Laurie had appeared, and almost immediately a dread had seized
her that she could neither explain nor understand. She had attempted a
little tentative conversation on the point with dearest Maud, but
dearest Maud had appeared so entirely incapable of understanding her
scruples that she had said no more. But her inexplicable anxiety had
already reached such a point that she had determined to say a word to
Laurie on the subject. This had been done, without avail; and now a
new step forward was to be made.
* * * * *
As to of what this step consisted she was perfectly aware.
The "controls," she believed--the spirits that desired to
communicate--had a series of graduated steps by which the
communications could be made, from mere incoherent noises (as a man
may rap a message from one room to another), through appearances, also
incoherent and intangible, right up to the final point of assuming
visible tangible form, and of speaking in an audible voice. This
process, she believed, consisted first in a mere connection between
spirit and matter, and finally passed into an actual assumption of
matter, molded into the form of the body once worn by the spirit on
earth. For nearly all of this process she had had the evidence of her
own senses; she had received messages, inexplicable to her except on
the hypothesis put forward, from departed relations of her own; she
had seen lights, and faces, and even figures formed before her eyes,
in her own drawing-room; but she had not as yet, though dearest Maud
had been more fortunate, been able to handle and grasp such figures,
to satisfy the sense of touch, as well as of sight, in proof of the
reality of the phenomenon.
Yes; she was satisfied even with what she had seen; she had no manner
of doubt as to the theories put before her by Mr. Vincent; yet she
shrank (and she scarcely knew why) from that final consummation which
it was proposed to carry out if possible that evening. But the
shrinking centered round some half-discerned danger to Laurie Baxter
rather than to herself.
* * * * *
It was these kinds of thoughts that beset her as she walked up beneath
the trees on her way homewards--checked and soothed now somewhat by
the pleasant air and the radiant sunlight, yet perceptible beneath
everything. And it was not only of Laurie Baxter that she thought; she
spared a little attention for herself.
For she had begun to be aware, for the first time since her
initiation, of a very faint distaste--as slight and yet as suggestive
as that caused by a half-perceived consciousness of a delicately
disagreeable smell. There comes such a moment in the life of cut
flowers in water, when the impetus of growing energy ceases, and a new
tone makes itself felt in their scent, of which the end is certain. It
is not sufficient to cause the flowers to be thrown away; they still
possess volumes of fragrance; yet these decrease, and the new scent
increases, until it has the victory.
So it was now to the perceptions of this lady. Oh! yes. Spiritualism
was very "teaching" and beautiful; it was perfectly compatible with
orthodox religion; it was undeniably true. She would not dream of
giving it up. Only it would be better if Laurie Baxter did not meddle
with it: he was too sensitive.... However, he was coming that evening
again.... There was the fact.
* * * * *
As she turned southwards at last, crossing the road again towards her
own street, it seemed to her that the day even now was beginning to
cloud over. Over the roofs of Kensington a haze was beginning to make
itself visible, as impalpable as a skein of smoke; yet there it was.
She felt a little languid, too. Perhaps she had walked too far. She
would rest a little after lunch, if dearest Maud did not mind; for
dearest Maud was to lunch with her, as was usual on Sundays when the
Colonel was away.
As she came, slower than ever, down the broad opulent pavement of
Queen's Gate, through the silence and emptiness of Sunday--for the
church bells were long ago silent--she noticed coming towards her,
with a sauntering step, an old gentleman in frock coat and silk hat of
a slightly antique appearance, spatted and gloved, carrying his hands
behind his back, as if he were waiting to be joined by some friend
from one of the houses. She noticed that he looked at her through his
glasses, but thought no more of it till she turned up the steps of her
own house. Then she was startled by the sound of quick footsteps and
a voice.
"I beg your pardon, madam ..."
She turned, with her key in the door, and there he stood, hat in hand.
"Have I the pleasure of speaking to Lady Laura Bethell?"
There was a pleasant brisk ring about his voice that inclined her
rather favorably towards him.
"Is there anything.... Did you want to speak to me...? Yes, I am Lady
Laura Bethell."
"I was told you were at church, madam, and that you were not at home
to visitors on Sunday."
"That is quite right.... May I ask...?"
"Only a few minutes, Lady Laura, I promise you. Will you forgive my
persistence?"
Yes; the man was a gentleman; there was no doubt of that.
"Would not tomorrow do? I am rather engaged today."
He had his card-case ready, and without answering her at once, he came
up the steps and handed it to her.
The name meant nothing at all to her.
"Will not tomorrow...?" she began again.
"Tomorrow will be too late," said the old gentleman. "I beg of you,
Lady Laura. It is on an extremely important matter."
She still hesitated an instant; then she pushed the door open and went
in.
"Please come in," she said.
She was so taken aback by the sudden situation that she forgot
completely that the drawing-room would be upside down, and led the way
straight upstairs; and it was not till she was actually within the
door, with the old gentleman close on her heels, that she saw that,
with the exception of three or four chairs about the fire and the
table set out near the hearthrug, the room was empty of furniture.
"I forgot," she said; "but will you mind coming in here.... We ... we
have a meeting here this evening."
She led the way to the fire, and at first did not notice that he was
not following her. When she turned round she saw the old gentleman,
with his air of antique politeness completely vanished, standing and
looking about him with a very peculiar expression. She also noticed,
to her annoyance, that the cabinet was already in place in the little
ante-room and that his eyes almost immediately rested upon it. Yet
there was no look of wonder in his face; rather it was such a look
as a man might have on visiting the scene of a well-known
crime--interest, knowledge, and loathing.
"So it is here--" he said in quite a low voice.
Then he came across the room towards her.