A man whose intelligence is so limited as that of Sam Sleeny is always
too rapid and rash in his inferences. Because he had seen Farnham give
Maud a handful of roses, he was ready to believe things about their
relations that had filled him with fury; and now, because he had seen
the same man talking with a beautiful girl and her mother, the
conviction was fixed in his mind that Farnham's affections were placed
in that direction, and that he was therefore no longer to be dreaded as
a rival. He went home happier, in this belief, than he had been for
many a day; and so prompt was his progress in the work of deceiving
himself, that he at once came to the conclusion that little or nothing
now stood between him and the crowning of his hopes. His happiness made
him unusually loquacious, and at the supper-table he excited the
admiration of Matchin and the surprise of Maud by his voluble history
of the events of the day. He passed over Offitt's visit in silence,
knowing that the Matchins detested him; but he spoke with energetic
emphasis of the beauty of the house, the handsome face and kindly
manners of Farnham, and the wonderful beauty and sweetness of Alice
Belding.
"Did that bold thing go to call on him alone?" cried Miss Maud,
thoroughly aroused by this supposed offence against the proprieties of
life.
"Why, no, Mattie," said Sam, a little disconcerted. "Her ma was along."
"Why didn't you say so, then?" asked the unappeased beauty.
"I forgot all about the old lady, though she was more chinny than the
young one. She just seemed like she was a-practisin' the mother-in-law,
so as to do it without stumblin' when the time come."
"Hullo! Do you think they are strikin' a match?" cried Saul, in high
glee. "That would be first-rate. Keep the money and the property all
together. There's too many of our rich girls marryin' out of the State
lately--keeps buildin' dull."
"I don't believe a word of it," Maud interposed. "He ain't a man to be
caught by a simperin' schoolgirl. And as to money, He's got a plenty
for two. He can please himself when he marries."
"Yes, but may be he won't please you, Mattie, and that would be a
pity," said the ironical Saul.
The old man laughed loudly at his own sarcasm, and pushed his chair
back from the table, and Maud betook herself to her own room, where she
sat down, as her custom was, by the window, looking over the glowing
lake, and striving to read her destiny as she gazed into the crimson
and golden skies. She did not feel at all so sure as she pretended that
there was no danger of the result that Sleeny had predicted; and now
that she was brought face to face with it, she was confounded at
discovering how much it meant to her. She was carrying a dream in her
heart which would make or ruin her, according as it should prove true
or false. She had not thought of herself as the future wife of Farnham
with any clearness of hope, but she found she could not endure the
thought of his marrying any one else and passing forever out of her
reach. She sat there, bitterly ruminating, until the evening glow had
died away from the lake and the night breeze spread its viewless wings
and flapped heavily in over the dark ridge and the silent shore. Her
thoughts had given her no light of consolation; her chin rested on her
hands, her elbows on her knees; her large eyes, growing more luminous
in the darkness, stared out at the gathering night, scarcely noting
that the sky she gazed at had changed from a pompous scene of red and
yellow splendor to an infinite field of tender and dark violet, fretted
with intense small stars.
"What shall I do?" she thought. "I am a woman. My father is poor. I
have got no chance. Jurildy is happier to-day than I am, and got more
sense."
She heard a timid rap at her door, and asked, sharply:
"Who's there?"
"It's me," said Sleeny's submissive voice.
"What do you want?" she asked again, without moving.
"Mr. Bott give me two tickets to his seance tonight,"--Sam called it
"seeuns,"--"and I thought mebbe you'd like to go."
There was silence for a moment. Maud was thinking: "At any rate it will
be better than to sit here alone and cry all the evening." So she said:
"I'll come down in a minute." She heard Sam's heavy step descending the
stairs, and thought what a different tread another person had; and she
wondered whether she would ever "do better" than take Sam Sleeny; but
she at once dismissed the thought. "I can't do that; I can't put my
hand in a hand that smells so strong of sawdust as Sam's. But he is a
good soul, and I am sorry for him, every time I look in the glass."
Looking in the glass, as usual, restored her good humor, and she
started off to the ghostly rendezvous with her faithful attendant. They
never talked very much when they were alone together, and this evening
both were thoughtful. Maud had never taken this commerce with ghosts
much to heart. She had a feeling, which she could hardly have defined,
that it was a common and plebeian thing to believe in it, and if she
ever heard it ridiculed she joined in the cry without mercy. But it was
an excitement and an interest in a life so barren of both that she
could not afford to throw it away. She had not intelligence enough to
be disgusted or shocked by it. If pressed to explain the amount of her
faith in the whole business, she would probably have said she thought
"there was something in it," and stopped at that. In minds like hers,
there is no clearly drawn line between the unusual and the
supernatural. An apparent miracle pleased her as it would please a
child, without setting her to find out how it was done. She would
consult a wizard, taking the chances of his having occult sources of
information, with the same irregular faith in the unlikely with which
some ladies call in homoeopathic practitioners.
All the way to the rooms of Bott, she was revolving this thought in her
mind: "Perhaps he could tell me something about Mr. Farnham. I don't
think much of Bott; he has too many knuckles on his hands. I never saw
a man with so many knuckles. I wouldn't mention Mr. Farnham to him to
save his life, but I might get something out of him without telling him
anything. He is certainly a very smart man, and whether it's spirits or
not, he knows lots of things."
It was in this mood that she entered the little apartment where Bott
held what he called his "Intermundane Seances." The room was small and
stuffy. A simulacrum of a chest of drawers in one corner was really
Bott's bed, where the seer reposed at night, and which, tilted up
against the wall during the day, contained the rank bedclothes, long
innocent of the wash-tub. There were a dozen or so of cane-bottom
chairs, a little table for a lamp, but no other furniture. At one side
of the room was a small closet without a door, but with a dark and
dirty curtain hung before its aperture. Around it was a wooden railing,
breast high.
A boy with a high forehead, and hair combed behind ears large and
flaring like those of a rabbit, sat by the door, and took the tickets
of invited guests and the half-dollars of the casuals. The seer
received everybody with a nerveless shake of a clammy hand, showed them
to seats, and exchanged a word or two about the weather, and the
"conditions," favorable or otherwise, to spiritual activity. When he
saw Maud and Sam his tallowy face flushed, in spots, with delight. He
took them to the best places the room afforded, and stammered his
pleasure that they had come.
"Oh! the pleasure is all ours," said Maud, who was always
self-possessed when she saw men stammering. "It's a great privilege to
get so near to the truth as you bring us, Mr. Bott."
The prophet had no answer ready; he merely flushed again in spots, and
some new arrivals called him away.
The room was now pretty well filled with the unmistakable crowd which
always attend such meetings. They were mostly artisans, of more
intellectual ambition than their fellows, whose love of the marvellous
was not held in control by any educated judgment. They had long,
serious faces, and every man of them wore long hair and a soft hat.
Their women were generally sad, broken-spirited drudges, to whom this
kind of show was like an opera or a ball. There were two or three
shame-faced believers of the better class, who scoffed a little but
trembled in secret, and a few avowed skeptics, young clerks on a mild
spree, ready for fun if any should present itself.
Bott stepped inside the railing by the closet, and placing his hands
upon it, addressed the assembly. He did not know what peculiar shape
the manifestations of the evening might take. They were in search of
truth; all truth was good. They hoped for visitors from the unseen
speers; he could promise nothing. In this very room the spirits of the
departed had walked and talked with their friends; perhaps they might
do it again; he knew not. How they mingled in the earth-life, he did
not pretend to say; perhaps they materialized through the mejum;
perhaps they dematerialized material from the audience which they
rematerialized in visible forms; as to that, the opinion of another--he
said with a spacious magnanimity--was as good as his. He would now
request two of the audience to step up and tie him. One of the
long-haired ruminant men stood up, and a young fellow, amid much
nudging and giggling among the scorners, was also forced from his
chair. They came forward, the believer with a business-like air, which
showed practice, and the young skeptic blushing and ill at ease. Bott
took a chair inside the curtain, and showed them how to tie him. They
bound him hand and foot, the believer testified that the binding was
solid, and the skeptic went to his seat, playfully stepping upon the
toes of his scoffing friends. The curtain was lowered, and the lamp was
turned down.
In a few moments, a scuffling sound was heard in the closet, and Bott's
coat came flying out into the room. The believer pulled back the
curtain, and Botts sat in his chair, his shirt sleeves gleaming white
in the dust. His coat was laid over his shoulders, and almost as soon
as the curtain was lowered he yelled for light, and was disclosed
sitting tied as before, clothed in his right coat.
Again the curtain went down amid a sigh of satisfaction from the
admiring audience, and a choking voice, which tried hard not to sound
like Bott's, cried out from the closet: "Turn down the light; we want
more power." The kerosene lamp was screwed down till hardly a spark
illumined the visible darkness, and suddenly a fiery hand appeared at
the aperture of the closet, slowly opening and shutting its long
fingers.
A half dozen voices murmured: "A spirit hand"; but Sam Sleeny whispered
to Maud: "Them are Bott's knuckles, for coin." The hand was withdrawn
and a horrible face took its place--a pallid corpse-like mask, with
lambent fire sporting on the narrow forehead and the high cheek-bones.
It stayed only an instant, but Sam said, "That's the way Bott will look
in----"
"Hush!" said Maud, who was growing too nervous to smile, for fear of
laughing or crying.
A sound of sobbing came from a seat to the right of them. A poor woman
had recognized the face as that of her husband, who had died in the
army, and she was drawing the most baleful inferences from its fiery
adjuncts.
A moment later, Bott came out of the closet, crouching so low that his
head was hardly two feet from the ground. He had a sheet around his
neck, covering his whole person, and a white cap over his head,
concealing most of his face. In this constrained attitude he hopped
about the clear space in front of the audience with a good deal of
dexterity, talking baby-talk in a shrill falsetto. "Howdy, pappa!
Howdy, mamma! Itty Tudie tum adin!"
A rough man and woman, between joy and grief, were half hysterical.
They talked to the toad-like mountebank in the most endearing tones,
evidently believing it was their dead baby toddling before them. Two or
three times the same horrible imposture was repeated. Bott never made
his appearance without somebody recognizing him as a dear departed
friend. The glimmering light, the unwholesome excitement, the servile
credulity fixed by long habit, seemed to produce a sort of passing
dementia upon the regular habitues.
With these performances the first part came to an end. The light was
turned on again, and the tying committee was requested to come forward
and examine the cords with which Bott still seemed tightly bound. The
skeptic remained scornfully in his seat, and so it was left for the
believer to announce that not a cord had been touched. He then untied
Bott, who came out from the closet, stretching his limbs as if glad to
be free, and announced that there would be a short intermission for an
interchange of views.
As he came toward Maud, Sam rose and said:
"Whew! he smells like a damp match. I'll go out and smoke a minute, and
come back."
Bott dropped into the seat which Sleeny had left.
To one who has never attended one of these queer _cenacula_, it would
be hard to comprehend the unhealthy and even nauseous character of the
feeling and the conversation there prevalent. The usual decent
restraints upon social intercourse seem removed. Subjects which the
common consent of civilized creatures has banished from mixed society
are freely opened and discussed. To people like the ordinary run of the
believers in spiritism, the opera, the ballet, and the annual Zola are
unknown, and they must take their excitements where they can find them.
The dim light, the unhealthy commerce of fictitious ghosts, the
unreality of act and sentiment, the unwonted abandon, form an
atmosphere in which these second-hand mystics float away into a sphere
where the morals and the manners are altogether different from those of
their working days.
Miss Matchin had not usually joined in these morbid discussions. She
was of too healthy an organization to be tempted by so rank a mental
feast as that, and she had a sort of fierce maidenhood about her which
revolted at such exposures of her own thought. But to-night she was
sorely perplexed. She had been tormented by many fancies as she looked
out of her window into the deepening shadows that covered the lake. The
wonders she had seen in that room, though she did not receive them with
entire faith, had somewhat shaken her nerves; and now the seer sat
beside her, his pale eyes shining with his own audacity, his lank hair
dripping with sweat, his hands uneasily rubbing together, his whole
attitude expressive of perfect subjection to her will.
"Why isn't this a good chance?" she thought. "He is certainly a smart
man. Horrid as he looks, he knows lots. May be he could tell me how to
find out."
She began in her airiest manner: "Oh, Mr. Bott, what a wonderful gift
you have got! How you must look down on us poor mortals!"
Bott grew spotted, and stammered:
"Far from it, Miss Matchin. I couldn't look down on you."
"Oh, you are flattering. That's not right, because I believe every word
you say--and that ain't true."
She rattled recklessly on in the same light tone.
"I'm going to ask you something very particular. I don't know who can
tell me, if you can't. How can a young lady find out whether a young
gentleman is in love with her or not? Now, tell me the truth this
time," she said with a nervous titter, "for it's very important."
This question from any one else would not have disconcerted Bott in the
least. Queries as absurd had frequently been put to him in perfect good
faith, and answered with ready and impudent ignorance. But, at those
giggling words of Maud Matchin, he turned livid and purple, and his
breath came heavily. There was room for but one thought in that narrow
heart and brain. He had long cherished a rather cowardly fondness for
Maud, and now that this question was put to him by the agitated girl,
his vanity would not suffer him to imagine that any one but himself was
the subject of her dreams. There was, to him, nothing especially out of
the way in this sort of indirect proposal on the part of a young woman.
It was entirely in keeping with the general tone of sentiment among the
people of his circle, which aimed at nothing less than the emancipation
of the world from its old-fashioned decencies.
But he would not answer hastily; he had a coward's caution. He looked a
moment at the girl's brilliant color, her quick, high breathing, her
eager eyes, with a gloating sense of his good luck. But he wanted her
thoroughly committed. So he said, with an air in which there was
already something offensively protecting:
"Well, Miss Matchin, that depends on the speer. If the affection be
unilateral, it is one thing; if it be recippercal, it is another. The
currents of soul works in different ways."
"But what I mean is, if a young lady likes a young gentleman pretty
well, how is she going to find out for sure whether he likes her?" She
went intrepidly through these words, though her cheeks were burning,
and her eyes would fall in spite of her, and her head was singing.
There was no longer any doubt in Bott's mind. He was filled with an
insolent triumph, and thought only of delaying as long as possible the
love chase of which he imagined himself the object. He said, slowly and
severely:
"The question is too imperious to be answered in haste. I will put
myself in the hands of the sperruts, and answer it as they choose after
the intermission."
He rose and bowed, and went to speak a word or two to his other
visitors. Sam came back and took his seat by Maud, and said:
"I think the fun is about over. Less go home."
"Go home yourself, if you want to," was the petulant reply. "I am going
to stay for the inspirational discourse."
"Oh, my!" said Sam. "That's a beautiful word. You don't know how pretty
your mouth looks when you say that." Sam had had his beer, and was
brave and good-natured.
Bott retired once more behind the railing, but took his seat in a chair
outside the curtain, in full view of the audience. He sat for some
minutes motionless, staring at vacancy. He then slowly closed his eyes,
and a convulsive shudder ran through his frame. This was repeated at
rapid intervals, with more or less violence. He next passed his hands
alternately over his forehead, as if he were wiping it, and throwing
some invisible, sticky substance, with a vicious snap, to right and
left. At last, after a final shudder, which stiffened him into the
image of death for a moment, he rose to his feet and, leaning on the
railing, began to intone, in a dismal whine, a speech of which we need
give only the opening words.
"Dear brothers and sisters of the earth-life! On pearly wings of
gossamer-down we float down from our shining speers to bring you
messages of the higher life. Let your earth-soul be lifted to meet our
sperrut-soul; let your earth-heart blend in sweet accordion with our
heaven-heart; that the beautiful and the true in this weary earth-life
may receive the bammy influence of the Eden flowrets, and rise, through
speers of disclosure, to the plane where all is beautiful and all is
true."
He continued in this strain for some time, to the evident edification
of his audience, who listened with the same conventional tolerance, the
same trust that it is doing your neighbor good, with which the ordinary
audience sits under an ordinary sermon. Maud, having a special reason
for being alert, listened with a real interest. But during his speech
proper he made no allusion to the subject on which she had asked for
light. It was after he had finished his harangue, and had gone through
an _entr'acte_ of sighs and shudders, that he announced himself once
more in the hands of the higher intelligences, and ready to answer
questions. "It does not need," he whined, "the word of the month or the
speech of the tongue to tell the sperruts what your souls desire. The
burden of your soul is open to the sperrut-eye. There sits in this room
a pure and lovely soul in quest of light. Its query is, How does heart
meet heart in mutual knowledge?"
Maud's cheek grew pale and then red, and her heart beat violently. But
no one noticed her, and the seer went on. "If a true heart longs for
another, there is no rest but in knowledge, there is no knowledge but
in trewth, there is no trewth but in trust. Oh, my brother, if you love
a female, tell your love. Oh, my sister, if you love--hum--if you
love--hum--an individual of the opposite sex--oh, tell your love!--Down
with the shams of a false-hearted society; down with the chains of
silence that crushes your soul to the dust! If the object of your
hearts' throbs is noble, he will respond. Love claims love. Love has a
right to love. If he is base, go to a worthier one. But from your brave
and fiery heart a light will kindle his, and dual flames will wrap two
chosen natures in high-menial melodies, when once the revelating word
is spoke."
With these words he subsided into a deep trance, which lasted till the
faithful grew tired of waiting, and shuffled slowly out of the door.
When the last guest had gone, he rose from his chair, with no pretence
of spiritual dignity, and counted his money and his tickets. He
stretched himself in two chairs, drew his fingers admiringly through
his lank locks, while a fatuous grin of perfect content spread over his
face, as he said aloud to himself, "She has got it bad. I wonder
whether she will have the nerve to ask me. I'll wait awhile, anyhow.
I'll lose nothing by waiting."
Meanwhile, Maud was walking rapidly home with Sam. She was excited and
perplexed, and did not care to answer Sam's rather heavy pleasantries
over the evening's performance. He ridiculed the spirit-lights, the
voices, and the jugglery, without provoking a reply, and at last he
said:
"Well, what do you think of his advising the girls to pop? This ain't
leap year!"
"What of that?" she answered, hastily. "I don't see why a girl hasn't
as good a right to speak her mind as a man."
"Why, Mattie," said Sam, with slow surprise, "no decent girl would do
that."
They had come to Matchin's gate. She slipped in, then turned and said:
"Well, don't be frightened, Mr. Sleeny; I'm not going to propose to
you," and she was gone from his sight.
She went directly to her room, and walked up and down a few moments
without taking off her hat, moving with the easy grace and the
suppressed passion of an imprisoned panther. Then she lighted her lamp
and placed it on her bureau at one side of her glass. She searched in
her closet and found a candle, which she lighted and placed on the
other side of the glass. She undressed with reckless haste, throwing
her clothes about on the floor, and sat down before her mirror with
bare arms and shoulders, and nervously loosened her hair, watching
every movement with blazing eyes. The thick masses of her blue-black
curls fell down her back and over her sloping shoulders, which glowed
with the creamy light of old ivory. The unequal rays of the lamp and
candle made singular effects of shadow on the handsome face, the
floating hair, and the strong and wholesome color of her neck and arms.
She gazed at herself with eager eyes and parted lips, in an anxiety too
great to be assuaged by her girlish pride in her own beauty. "This is
all very well," she said, "but he will not see me this way. Oh! if I
only dared to speak first. I wonder if it would be as the spirits said.
'If he is noble he will respond!' He _is_ noble, that's sure. 'Love
claims love,' they said. But I don't know as I love him. I _would_, if
that would fetch him, quick enough;" and the hot blood came surging up,
covering neck and brow with crimson.