My lady's eyes
Ensphere the skies,
Abound in lovely mysteries:
Behind their bars
Are pent the stars,
Warm Venus' glow, the shafts of Mars.
Once, murky night
Shut in my sight:
One glance revealed the source of light!
Now, to be wise
Or gay, I rise,
By gazing in my lady's eyes!
--_Song from The Oculist_.
The process of bringing the "Jones plane of mentality" uppermost in Mr.
Amidon would not have been regarded by the masculine reader of the
unregenerate sort (though to such far be it from me to appeal!) as an
operation at all painful. But Mr. Amidon, I must declare, was not of
the unregenerate sort.
"Now," said Madame le Claire, "sit down in the arm-chair, and in a few
minutes you will feel a sensation of drowsiness. Soon you will sleep.
Think with all your power that you are to sleep."
She was sitting in a very high chair, he in a low one, so that her eyes
were above his. The professor was blent with the shadows of some
corner, in silent self-effacement, with a note-book in his hand.
Amidon tried to think with all his power that he was to sleep; but the
lights and shadows and depths of the woman's eyes drew all thoughts to
them. Uncle Toby, looking for the mote in the eye of the Widow Wadman,
must have felt as did our wandering Florian. Never before had he noted
for more than a fleeting glance the light that lies in woman's eyes.
Now those limpid orbs met his in a regard, kindly, steady, eloquent of
unutterable things. He noted the dark, arched, ebon sweep of the
eyebrow, the long dark lashes curved daintily upward, the shining
whiteness in the corners, and the wondrous irises. The one which was
gray was dark like a moonlit sky; the other, like the same sky necked
with clouds, and filled with the golden smoke of some far-off
conflagration; and at the inner margin of both, the black of the
dilated pupils seemed to spread out into the iris in rays of feathery
blackness. They seemed to him like twin worlds--great, capacious,
mysterious, alluring, absorbing. Behind the feathery curtains of those
irises lay all the lovely things of which he had ever thought or
dreamed--the things which sculptors and poets and painters see, and
seek to express. And without changing his gaze, he saw below the eyes
the downy cheek, and the red lips so sweetly curved. A new thrill ran
through the man, and a new light came into his eyes. Madame le Claire
blushed.
[Illustration: A new thrill ran through the man and a new light came
into his eyes]
"Are you thinking of going to sleep?"
"I beg your pardon," said he; "I was thinking--I am afraid I was not!"
"Try again," said she; "and please control your thoughts. Think that
you--are--going--to sleep. To sleep----Sleep! Sleep!----
Slee--ee--eep!"
Now Amidon's eyes sought hers again, and held there; and the twin
worlds, sphered in some slowly-turning orbit, seemed swinging in their
native space. Now the cheeks and hair and mouth came out in their
places, returning to distinctness like features of a face on a screen.
Now the eyes became twin stars again, casting on him once more the
effulgence of their binary glow.
And now eyes and face and hair, and Madame le Claire--all passed away;
and Florian Amidon became as naught, and the tigrine lady and the faded
professor played with the thing which had been he, as upon a machine.
The pillar of Hazelhurst society, the banker now five years lost, the
bewildered wretch of the sleeping-car, was now, by his own act, given
over as passively as some inert instrument, body and soul, to the
guidance and manipulation of this shady occultist, not four hours known
to him--while outside droned the muffled roar of the human cyclone
which sweeps and whirls and eddies through Manhattan. So stripped of
stability was the pillar, that he was now a mere feather of humanity,
self-abandoned to the clasp of the storm of the modern Babylon. Madame
le Claire questioned, Amidon answered (or Something answered for him),
and Professor Blatherwick wrote in his book--wrote the data, of "te
Chones blane of mentality."
"Dis iss enough," said the professor, "for vunce. Pring him to!"
Madame le Claire leaned back, gave her subject a long look, and then,
walking to him, took his head tenderly in her hands. With the left,
she held his forehead; the fingers of the right crept insinuatingly
among the curls resting on his neck, swept thence over to his brow, and
down across his eyelids, closing them; and Amidon sat, senseless as a
statue, and almost as still.
"Right!" said Madame le Claire sharply. "Wake!"
Amidon opened his eyes wearily.
"When are you going to begin?" said he.
"Ve are t'rough," said the professor. "Ve know it all."
"And Brassfield? Did I----?"
"You have done him notting," said the professor. "You are all recht.
You need not fear----"
"And the lady--Elizabeth?" suggested Amidon, as passing to the thing of
next importance.
"It is near morning," said Madame le Claire, "and you are prostrated.
We are all very tired. Aaron must take you to your hotel. You must
sleep. Never fear, no harm is coming to you. When you wake, come to
me, and I will tell you all about it--'All Mysteries Solved,' you know.
Good night. You will sleep late in the morning."