He could see nothing, hear nothing, therefore his face lost its light.
"Well, we've got to trust him. He's all the help in sight."
Something, a breath, the light caress of a hand, passed over his hair,
and a whisper that was almost tone spoke in his ear, "_Fear nothing, if
you will be guided and protected._"
Sweet as this voice was, it irritated him, for he could not disassociate
his mother from it. Indeed, it had something subtly familiar in its
utterance, and yet he could not accuse her of deceit. He only roughly
said: "Don't do that! I don't like that!"
Silence followed, and then his mother sadly said: "You have hurt her.
She will not speak again."
"Let her show herself. How do I know who is speaking to me? Let me see
her face again." He added this in a gentler voice, being moved by a
vivid memory of the exquisite picture Altair had made.
After another pause Mrs. Ollnee answered: "She will do so. She says
soon. She has gone; but your father wants to speak to you."
Victor rose impatiently. "Tell him to come again some other time. I'm
sleepy now."
She turned away saddened by his manner, and with a gentle "good-night"
went softly from the room.
Victor regretted his bluntness, but could not free himself from a
feeling that his mother's Voices were deceptive or imaginary, and her
visit hurt and disgusted him so deeply that the charm of his evening's
companionship with Leo was all but lost. "Part of her phenomena are
real, but these Voices--" He broke off and went to his bed with a vague
feeling of loss weighing him down.
For a half-hour he lay in growing bitterness, and then quite suddenly he
thought he detected a thin, blue vapor rising from the rag rug at the
side of his bed, and for an instant he was startled. "Is it smoke? Or do
I imagine it?" As it rose and sank, expanded and contracted, he studied
it closely. It was not smoke, for it did not ascend. It was more like
filmy drapery tossed by a wind from a hidden aperture in the floor.
Motionless, amazed, and awed, he watched it, till out of it the face of
a woman looked, her wistful eyes touched with an accusing sorrow. It
was Altair, and her form became more real from moment to moment, until
at last he could detect the swell of her bosom, draped with the folds of
a shimmering white robe. As he waited a hand appeared at her side,
vaguely outlined, yet alive. He could see the fingers loosely clasped
about a rose. She was so beautiful that he lay gazing at her in
speechless wonder. "Am I dreaming?" he asked himself. "I _must_ be
dreaming." And yet he could feel the air from the window.
In the light of her glance he forgot all his other loves and cares. His
worship for her returned like swift hunger, and he yearned to touch her,
to hear her voice. "She is a dream," he decided, and his hand, lifted to
test the vision, fell back upon the coverlet.
As if reading his thought, Altair put out her right arm and touched his
wrist with a caress like the stroke of a beam of moonlight, so light and
cold it was.
"_Victor_," she seemed to say, and his whisper was almost as light as
her own.
"Who are you?"
"_Don't you know me? I am Altair. Do not forget me._"
"I will not forget you," he answered. "I can't forget you. Why do you
look so sad?"
"_It is cold and empty where I dwell. I come to you for happiness and
warmth. You had forgotten me. You would not listen to my voice._" Her
reproach moved him almost to tears.
"I could not see you. I was not sure."
"_I do not accuse you. It is natural for you to love. When the day comes
you will seek another. One whose flesh is warm. Mine is cold. She is of
the day. I am of the night. But do not refuse to speak to me._"
Her bust had grown fuller, more complete as she spoke, and yet from the
waist downward she seemed but a trailing garment of convoluting,
phosphorescent gauze. Her left hand still hung at her side, vague,
diaphanous, but her right lay upon her breast, as beautiful, as real as
firelit ivory, and her face seemed to glow as though with some inward
radiance.
Victor could follow the exquisite line of her brow, and her eyes were
glorious pools of color, deep and dark with mystery and passion. Slowly
she sank as if kneeling, her stately head lowered, bent above him, and
he felt the touch of soft lips upon his own--a kiss so warm, so human
that it filled his heart with worship. Gently he lifted his hand,
seeking to draw her to him, and for an instant he felt her pliant body
in the circle of his arms--then she dissolved, vanished--like some
condensation of the atmosphere, and he was left alone, aching with
longing and despair.
For a long time he waited, hoping she would return. He saw the moonlight
fade from the carpet. He heard the night wind amid the maple leaves, and
he knew he had not been dreaming, for that strange Oriental perfume
lingered in the air, and on the coverlet where her exquisite hand had
rested a white bloom lay, mystic and wonderful. He lifted it, and its
breath, sweeter than that of any other flower he had ever held, filled
him with instant languor and happy release of care.
His next perception was that of sunlight. It was morning, and the kine
and fowls were astir.
He looked for the mysterious flower, but it was gone. He sprang from his
bed and searched the room for it. "It did not exist," he sadly
concluded. "It has returned to the mysterious world from whence it
came."
For a long time afterward he suffered with a sense of loss, while the
sunlight deepened in his room and the sounds of the barn-yard brought
back to him the realization that he was in effect a fugitive in the
house of a stranger. Slowly the normal action of his mind and body
resumed its sway, and he dressed, quite sure that something abnormal had
brought this vision to him. He wondered if he, too, were getting
mediumistic. "Am I to be a son of my mother? Am I to hear voices and see
visions?" he asked himself, with a note of alarm. He began to fear the
disintegrating effects of these experiences. His personality; his body
hitherto so solid, so stable, seemed about to develop disturbing
capabilities.
He was profoundly pleased and reassured to find on his dressing-room
table a large white rose, a rose precisely like that which had been
laid upon his coverlet by the hand of the dream-woman. It's odor was the
same, and its petals were as fresh as if it had just been cut. It
reassured him by convincing him that his vision was real--that it had a
basis of physical change; but it also started a perplexing chain of
thought. "How came the rose here? Who brought it?" was his question. "It
certainly was not there when I went to bed."
With the flower in his hand, he still stood looking down at the place
where the hand of Altair had rested--still marveling at this mingling of
the real and the fantastic, the dream and the rose, when something
shining revealed itself half concealed by the pillow; and putting out
his hand he took up a little brooch of turquoise set with diamonds,
which he recognized instantly as one that Leo had worn at her throat
when she said good-night.
Sinking into a chair, he stared now at the jewel, now at the rose, while
a thrill of pride, of mastery, of joy stole through him. His blood
warmed. His heart quickened its beat. Could it be that Leo had been his
visitor? Was it possible that she, burning with hidden love of him, had
stolen to his room, and there at his bedside, masking herself as Altair,
had bent to his drowsy eyes, and laid upon his lips that fervid kiss?
The thought confused him, overpowered him, exalted him.
His was a chivalrous nature, therefore this act, at the moment, seemed
neither unmaidenly nor wrong--indeed, it appeared very beautiful in his
eyes. It humbled him, made him wonder if he were worth the risk she had
run? He was not abnormally self-appreciative, but he had not been left
unaware of his appeal to women. His previous love-affairs had been those
of the undergraduate, proceeding under the jocular supervision of his
watchful fellows. His present case was in wholly different spirit. He
was a man now--in fact, his quarrel with Leo from the first had been
over her evident determination to treat him as a lad.
The memory of her serene self-possession made her self-surrender of the
night all the more amazing to him. "It is cold and empty where I dwell,"
she had said. This meant that she loved him--longed for him--it could
mean nothing else. Her love had begun during their ride on the lagoon,
in their delicious drowse on the grass. It had been deepened by their
afternoon of sweet companionship at tennis and over their books; then
came the walk in the moonlight and her acceptance of his caress in the
dusky place in the path--all were preparatory to this final wondrous
visit and confession.
And yet her eyes had never been other than those of a friend. Seemingly
she had laughed at herself for the momentary weakness of yielding to his
arm. Her daylight expression had always been that of the humorous,
self-reliant, rather intellectual girl, who acknowledges no fear of man
and no sudden rush of passion, and yet--How reconcile the facts!
He smiled to think how he had been deceived by her imperious air, by her
expressed contempt for his interest. "And all the while she was really
waiting for me to break through her reserve," he said; and this
delicious explanation satisfied him for a few moments, till he went
deeper into his memory of what she had said and done.
He was forced to reassure himself again by the jewel and the rose that
she had really come to him, so dream-like did the whole ethereal episode
now seem. The more he dwelt upon the vision the deeper it moved him.
It's growing significance set his blood aflame. In fiction and poesy
women often sacrifice their reserve, moved by uncontrollable longing,
like the heroine of mad Ophelia's song, because commanded by something
stronger than their sweet selves. It was hard to think of Leo as one
carried out of herself by love--and yet here lay the jewel of her bosom
in his hand! How to meet her puzzled and excited him.
Up to this minute he had admired her and had paid court to her as a
young man naturally addresses a handsome girl, but he was not violently
in love with her; indeed, she had interested him rather less than a girl
in Winona, daughter of Professor Boyden; but now, as he was about to
meet her in the breakfast-room, she possessed more power, more
significance, than any woman in the world. He recalled how fine and
helpful she had been during the few days of their acquaintance--her
serenity, her good sense, her pungent comment began to seem very
wonderful.
He looked at himself in the glass, finding there a very good-looking,
stalwart youth, but could not discover anything to account for the
sudden blaze of Leonora's self-sacrificing passion. He was neither a
fool nor a peacock, and he tried to account for her love on the ground
of her regard for his mother. Then, like a flash of light, came the
thought, "She was sleep-walking!"
He had read of the marvels of hypnotism and somnambulism. Perhaps in
some strange way his mother's desire to have Leo love her son had sent
the girl straight to his bedside. There was something uncanny in her
speech and in her gestures--only in her kiss had she been solidly,
warmly human.
And yet all this seemed so difficult to believe--and besides, if the
girl came in her sleep, did it not prove her love quite as conclusively?
It might be unconscious, but it was there.
With heart pounding mightily, and face set and stern, he left his room
and began descending the stairway, uncertain still of the way in which
he should meet her.
Happily he found no one in the dining-room but the maid, who said to
him, "Mr. Bartol would like to see Mr. Ollnee in his study as soon as
Mr. Ollnee has had his breakfast."
"Very well," he replied; "I will make short work of breakfast this
morning."
As he sat thus awaiting Leo, his mind filled with the wonder of her
self-surrender, he considered carefully in what way he should greet her.
"She must not know that I know," he decided. "I will greet her as if I
had not found the brooch, and I will leave it where she will happen upon
it accidentally."