Orson Vane, scintillating theatrically by the sea, was in a fine rage
when Nevins ceased to answer his telegrams. Telegrams struck Vane as the
most dramatic of epistles; there was always a certain pictorial effect
in tearing open the envelope, in imagining the hushed expectation of an
audience. A letter--pooh! A letter might be anything from a bill to a
billet. But a telegram! Those little slips of paper struck immediate
terror, or joy, or despair, or confusion; they hit hard, and swiftly.
Certainly he had been hitting Nevins hard enough of late. He had
peppered him with telegrams about the furniture, about the pictures; he
had forbidden one day what he had ordered the day before. It never
occurred to him that Nevins might seek escape from these torments. Yet
that was what Nevins had done. He had tippled himself into a condition
where he signed sweetly for each telegram and put it in the hall-rack.
They made a beautiful, yellow festoon on the mahogany background.
"Those," Nevins told himself, "is for a gentleman as is far too busy to
notice little things like telegrams."
Nevins watched that yellow border growing daily with fresh delight.
He could keep on accepting telegrams just as long as the sideboard held
its strength. Each new arrival from the Western Union drove him to more
glee and more spirits--of the kind one can buy bottled.
At last Orson Vane felt some alarm creeping through his armor of
dramatic pose. Could Nevins have come to any harm? It was very annoying,
but he would have to go to town for a day or so. That seemed
unavoidable. Just as he had made up his mind to it, he happened to slip
on a bit of lemon-peel. At once he fell into a towering rage. He cursed
the entire service on the _Beaurivage_ up hill and down dale. You could
hear him all over the harbor. It was the voice of a profane Voltaire.
That night, at the Casino, his rage found vent in action. He sold the
_Beaurivage_ as hastily as he had bought her.
He left for town, by morning, full of bitterness at the world's
conspiracy to cheat him. He felt that for a careless deck-hand to leave
lemon-peel on the deck of the Beaurivage was nothing less than part of
the world-wide cabal against his peace of mind.
He reached his town-house in a towering passion, all the accumulated
ill-temper of the last few days bubbling in him. He flung the housedoor
wide, stamped through the halls. "Nevins!" he shouted, "Nevins!"
Nothing stirred in the house. He entered room after room. Passing into
his dressing-room he almost tore the hanging from its rod. A gust of air
struck him from the wide-open window. Before he proceeded another step
this gust, that his opening of the curtain had produced, lifted the veil
from the mirror facing him. The veil swung up gently, revealed the
glass, and dropped again.
Then he realized the figure of Nevins on a couch. He walked up to him.
The smell of spirits met him at once.
"Poor Nevins!" he muttered.
Then he fell to further realizations.
The whole history of his three experiments unfolded itself before him.
What, after them all, had he gained? What, save the knowledge of the
littleness of the motives controlling those lives? This actor, this man
the world thought great, whose soul he had held in usurpation, up to a
little while ago, what was he? A very batch of vanities, a mountain of
egoisms. Had there been, in any of the thoughts, the moods he had
experienced from out the mental repertoire of that player, anything
indicative of nobility, of large benevolence, of sweet and light in the
finest human sense? Nothing, nothing. The ambition to imitate the
obvious points of human action and conduct, to the end that one be
called a character-actor; the striving for an echoed fame rightly
belonging to the supreme names of history; a yearning for the stimulus
of immediate acclamation--these things were not worth gaining. To have
experienced them was to have caught nothing beneficial.
Orson Vane began to consider himself with contempt. Upon himself must
fall the odium of what the souls he had borrowed had induced in him. The
littleness he had fathomed, the depths of character to which he had
sunk, all left their petty brands on him. He had penetrated the barriers
of other men's minds, but what had it profited him? As a ship becalmed
in foul waters takes on barnacles, so had he brought forth, from the
realm of alien springs and motives he had made his own, a dreadful
incrustation of painful conjectures on the supremacy of evil in the
world.
It needed only a glance at the man, Nevins, to force home the
destructiveness born of these incursions into other lives. That
trembling, cowering thing had been, before Orson Vane's departure from
the limitations of his own temperament, a decent, self-respecting
fellow. While now--
Vane paced about the house in bitter unrest. In the outer hall he
noticed the yellow envelopes bordering the coat-rack. He took one of
them down, opened it, and smiled. "Poor Nevins!" he murmured. The next
moment a lad from the Telegraph office appeared in the doorway. Vane
went forward himself; there was no use disturbing Nevins.
The wire had followed him on from the _Beaurivage_, or rather from the
man to whom he had sold her. It was from Augustus Vanlief. Its brevity
was like a blow in the face.
"Am ill," it said, "must see you."
It was still possible, that very hour, to get an express to the
Professor's mountain retreat. There was nothing to prevent immediate
departure. Nothing--except Nevins. The man really must exercise more
care about that mirror. He was safely out of all his experiments now,
but the thing was dangerous none the less; if it had been his own
property, he would have known how to deal with it. But it was the
Professor's secret, the discovery of a lifetime. For elaborate
precautions, or even for hiding the thing in some closet, there was no
time. He could only rouse Nevins as energetically as possible to a sense
of his previous defection from duty; gently and quite kindly he
admonished him to take every care of the new mirror in the time coming.
Nevins listened to him wide-eyed; his senses were still too much agog
for him to realize whence this change of voice and manner had come to
his master. It was merely another page in the chapter of bewilderment
that piled upon him. He bowed his promise to be careful, he assented to
a number of things he could not fathom, and when Vane was gone he
cleared the momentary trouble in his mind by an ardent drink. The liquor
brought him a most humorous notion, and one that he felt sure would
relieve him of all further anxieties on the score of the new mirror. He
approached the back of it, tore the curtain from its face, wheeled it to
the centre of the room, and placed all the other cheval-glasses close
by. Throughout this he had wit enough, or fear enough--for his memory
brought him just enough picture of Orson's own handling of this mirror
to inspire a certain awe of the front of the thing--never to pass in
face of the mirror. When he had the mirrors grouped in close ranks, he
spun about on his heels quickly, as if seized with the devout frenzy of
a dervish. He fell, finally, in a daze of dizziness and liquor. Yet he
had cunning enough left. He crept out of the room on his stomach, like a
snake with fiery breath. He knew that the angle at which the mirrors
were tilted would keep him, belly to the carpet, out of range. Then he
reeled, shouting, into the corridors.
He had accomplished his desire. He no longer knew one mirror from the
other.
Orson Vane, in the meanwhile, was being rushed to the mountains. It was
with a new shock of shame that he saw the ravages illness was making on
the fine face of Vanlief. This, too, was one of the items in the
profit-and-loss column of his experiments. Yet this burden was,
perhaps, a shared one.
"Ah," said Vanlief, with a quick breath of gladness, "thank God!" He
knew, the instant Vane spoke, that it was Orson Vane himself who had
come; he knew that there was no more doubt as to the success of his own
recent headlong journeyings. They had prostrated him; but--they had won.
Yet there was no knowing how far this illness might go; it was still
imperative to come to final, frank conclusions with the partner in his
secret.
The instant that Vane had been announced Jeannette Vanlief had left her
father's side. She withdrew to the adjoining room, where only a curtain
concealed her; the doors had all been taken down for the summer. She did
not wish to meet Orson Vane. Over her real feelings for him had come a
cloud of doubts and distastes. She had never admitted to herself,
openly, that she loved him; she tried to persuade herself that his
notorious vagaries had put him beyond her pale. She was determined, now,
to be an unseen ear to what might pass between Orson and her father. It
was not a nice thing to do, but, for all she knew, her father's very
life was at stake. What dire influence might Vane not have over her
father? She suspected there was some bond between them; in her father's
weakened state it seemed her duty to watch over him with every devotion
and alertness.
Yet, for a long time, the purport of the conversation quite eluded her.
"I have not gone the gamut of humanity," said Orson, "but I have almost,
it seems to me, gone the gamut of my own courage."
Vanlief nodded. He, too, understood. Consequences! Consequences! How the
consequences of this world do spoil the castles one builds in it!
Castles in the air may be as pretty as you please, but they are sure to
obstruct some other mortal's view of the sky.
"If I were younger," sighed Vanlief, "if I were only younger."
They did not yet, either of them, dare to be open, brutal, forthright.
"I could declare, I suppose," Vanlief went on, "that it was somewhat
your own fault. You chose your victims badly. You have, I presume, been
disenchanted. You found little that was beautiful, many things that were
despicable. The spectacles you borrowed have all turned out smoky. Yet,
consider--there are sure to be just as many rosy spectacles as dark ones
in the world."
"No doubt," assented Vane, though without enthusiasm, "but there are
still--the consequences. There is still the chance that I could never
repay the soul I take on loan; still the horror of being left to face
the rest of my days with a cuckoo in my brain. Mind, I have no
reproaches, none at all. You overstated nothing. I have felt, have
thought, have done as other men have felt and thought and done; their
very inner secret souls have been completely in my keeping. The
experiment has been a triumph. Yet it leaves me joyless."
"It has made me old," said Vanlief, simply. "Ah," he repeated, "if only
I were younger!"
"The strain," he began again, "of putting an end to your last experiment
has told on me. I overdid it. Such emotion, and such physical tension,
is more than I should have attempted. I begin to fear I may not last
very long. And in that case I think I shall have to take my secret with
me. Orson, it comes to this; I am too old to perfect this marvelous
thing to the point where it will be safe for humanity at large. It is
still unsafe,--you will agree to that. You might wreck your own life and
that of others. The chances are one in a thousand of your ever finding a
human being whom God has so graciously endowed with the divine spirit as
to be able to lose part of it without collapse. I have hoped and hoped,
that such a thing would happen; then there would be two perfectly even,
exactly tempered creatures; even if, upon that transfusion, the mirror
disappeared, there would be no unhappiness as a reproach. But we have
found nothing like that. You have embittered yourself; the glimpses of
other souls you have had have almost stripped you of your belief in an
eternal Good."
"You mean to send for the mirror?"
"It would be better, wiser. If I live, it will still be here. If I die,
it must be destroyed. In any event--"
At the actual approach of this conclusion to his experiments Orson Vane
felt a sense of coming loss. With all the dangers, all the loom of
possible disaster, he was not yet rid of the awful fascination of this
soul-snatching he had been engaged in.
"Perhaps," he argued, "my next experiment might find the one in a
thousand you spoke of."
"I think you had better not try again. Tell me, what was Wantage's soul
like?"
"Oh, I cannot put it into words. A little, feverish, fretful soul,
shouting, all the time: I, I, I! Plotting, planning for public
attention, worldly prominence. No thoughts save those of self. An active
brain, all bent on the ego. A brain that deliberately chose the theatre
because it seems the most spectacular avenue to eminence. A magnetism
that keeps outsiders wondering whether childishness or genius lurks
behind the mask. The bacillus of restlessness is in that brain; it is
never idle, always planning a new pose for the body and the voice."
"Well," urged Vanlief, "think what might have been had I not put a stop
to the thing. You don't realize the terrible anxiety I was in. You might
have ruined the man's career. However petty we, you and I, may hold
him, there are things the world expects of him; we came close to
spoiling all that. I had to act, and quickly. You may fancy the
difficulties of getting the mirror to Wantage. Oh, it is still all like
an evil dream." He lay silent a while, then resumed: "Is the mirror in
the old room?"
"Yes. With the others, in the dressing-room."
"Nevins looks out for it?"
"As always. Though he grows old, too."
Vanlief looked sharply at Orson, he suspected something behind that
phrase about Nevins. Again he urged:
"Better have Nevins bring the mirror back to me."
Vane hesitated. He murmured a reply that Jeannette no longer cared to
hear. The whole secret was open to her, now; she saw that the Orson Vane
she loved--she exulted now in her admission of that--was still the man
she thought him, that all his inexplicable divagations had been part of
this awful juggling with the soul that her father had found the trick
of. She realized, too, by the manner of Vane, that he had not yet given
up all thought of these experiments; he wanted one more. One more; one
more; it was the cry of the drunkard, the opium-eater, the victim of
every form of mania.
It should never be, that one more trial. What her father had done, she
could do. She glided out of the room, on the heels of her quick
resolution.
The two men, in their arguments, their widening discussions, did not
bring her to mind for hours. By that that time she was well on her way
to town.
Her purpose was clear to her; nothing should hinder its achievement. She
must destroy the mirror. There were sciences that were better killed at
the outset. She did not enter deeply into those phases of the question,
but she had the clear determination to prevent further mischief, further
follies on the part of Vane, further chances of her father's collapse.
The mirror must be destroyed. That was plain and simple.
It took a tremendous ringing and knocking to bring Nevins to the door of
Vane's house.
"I am Miss Vanlief," she said, "I want to see my father's mirror."
"Certainly, miss, certainly." He tottered before her, chuckling and
chattering to himself. He was in the condition now when nothing
surprised him; any rascal could have led him with a word or a hint; he
was immeasurably gay at everything in the world. He reeled to the
dressing-room with an elaborate air of courtesy.
"At your service, miss, there you are, miss. You walk straight on, and
there you are, miss. There's the mirror, miss, plain as pudding."
She strode past him, drawing her skirt away from the horrible taint of
his breath. She knew she would find the mirror at once, curtained and
solitary sentinel before the doorway. She would simply break it with her
parasol, stab it, viciously, from behind.
But, once past the portal, she gave a little cry.
All the mirrors were jumbled together, all looked alike, and all faced
her, mysterious, glaringly.
"Nevins," she called out, "which--which is the one?"
"Ah, miss," he said, leeringly, "don't I wish I knew."
No sense of possible danger to herself, only a despair at failure, came
upon Jeannette. Failure! Failure! She had meant to avert disaster, and
she had accomplished--nothing, nothing at all.
She left the house almost in tears. She felt sure Vane would yield again
to the temptation of these frightful experiments. She could do nothing,
nothing. She had felt justified in attempting destruction of what was
her father's; but she could not wantonly offer all that array of mirrors
on the altar of her purpose. She stumbled along the street, suffering,
full of tears. It was with a sigh of relief that she saw a hansom and
hailed it. The cab had hardly turned a corner before Orson Vane, coming
from another direction, let himself into his house. His conference with
Vanlief had ceased at his own promise to make just one more trial of the
mirror. He could not go about the business of the life he led in town
without assuring himself the mirror was safe.
He found Nevins incoherent and useless. He began to consider seriously
the advisability of discharging the man; still, he hated to do that to
an old servant, and the man might come to his senses and his duties.
He spent some little time re-arranging the mirrors in his room. He was
sure there had been no intrusion since he was there himself, and he knew
Nevins well enough to know that individual's horror of facing the
mirror. He himself faced the new mirror boldly enough, sure that his own
image was the only one resting there. He knew the mirror easily, in
spite of the robbery that the wind, as he thought, had committed.
Nevins, hiding in the corridor, watched him, in drunken amusement.