Mrs. Llewellyn had always held—in so far as she ever thought about the subject at all—that to consult a clairvoyant was not merely an imbecile folly, but a degrading action, nearly akin to crime. Now that she felt herself overmasteringly driven to such an unconscionable unworthiness she could not bring herself to do it openly. Anything underhand or secretive was utterly alien to her nature. She was a tall woman, notably well shaped, with unusual dignity of demeanor. The poise of her head would have appeared haughty but for the winning kindliness of her frequent smile. Her dark hair, dark eyes and very white skin accorded well with that abiding calm of her bearing which never seemed mere placidity in a face habitually lighted with interested comprehension. Like a cloudless springtime sunrise over limitless expanses of dewy prairies, she was enveloped in an atmosphere of spacious serenity of soul, and her appearance was entirely in consonance with her character. She was still a very beautiful woman, high-souled as she was beautiful and exceedingly straight-forward. Yet to drive in open day to a house bearing the displayed sign of a spirit-medium was more than she could do. Bidding her footman call for her later, much later, at her hairdresser’s, she dismissed her carriage at the main entrance of a department store. Leaving it by another entrance, she took a Street car for the neighborhood she sought. The neighborhood was altogether different from what she had anticipated; the houses, by no means small, were even handsome; not least handsome that of the clairvoyant. And it was very well kept, the pavement and the steps clean, the plate glass window panes bright, the shades and curtains new and tasteful, the silver doorknobs and door-bell fresh polished. There was a sign, indeed, but not the flaming horror her imagination had constructed from memories of signs seen in passing. This was a bit of glass set inside the big, bright pane of one of the parlor windows. It bore in small gold letters only the name, SALATHIEL VARGAS, and the word, CLAIRVOYANT.
A neat maid opened the door. Yes, Mr. Vargas was in; would she walk into the waiting room? The untenanted waiting room was a dignified parlor, furnished in the costliest way, but with a restraint as far as possible from ostentation. The rug was Persian, each piece of furniture different in design from any other, yet all harmonizing, while the ten pictures were paintings by well-known artists. Before Mrs. Llewellyn had time for more than one comprehensive and surprised glance about, when she had barely seated herself, the retreating maid struck two sharp notes on a silvery gong. Almost immediately the door leading to the rear room was opened. In it appeared a man under five feet tall, not dwarfish, but deformed. His patent-leather shoes were boyish, his trousers hung limp about legs shriveled to mere skeletal stems, and his left knee was bent and fixed at an unchanging angle, so that his step was a painful hobble. Above the waist he was well made; a deep chest; broad, square shoulders; a huge head with a vast shock of black, curly hair. He had the look of a musician or artist; with a wide forehead; delicately curved eyebrows; nose hooked, sharp and assertive; eyes, wide apart, large, dark brown with sparkles of red and green; and a mouth whose curled upper lip was almost too short. The mouth and eyes held Mrs. Llewellyn at first glance, and the instant change in them startled her. He had appeared with a suave mechanical smile, with a look of easy expectancy. As his gaze met hers his lips set and their redness dulled; his eyes were full of so poignant a dismay that she would not have been surprised had he abruptly retreated and slammed the door between them. Without a word he clung to the knob, staring at her. Then he drew the door to after him and leaned against it, still holding to the knob with one hand behind his back. When he spoke it was in a dry whisper.
“You here, of all women!”
“You know me!” she exclaimed; “I have never seen you.”
“You are seen of many thousands you never note,” he replied. “Everyone knows Mrs. David Llewellyn. Everyone knew Constance Palgrave.”
“You flatter me,” she said coldly, with the air of one resenting an unwelcome familiarity.
“Flattery is part of my trade,” he replied. “But I do not flatter you. So little that I have forgotten my manners. I should have asked you to step into my consulting room. Pray, enter it.”
She passed him as he held the door open for her. The inner room was not less seemly than the outer. Except for three doors and one broad window looking out on an area, it was walled with bookcases some eight feet high, broken only where there were set into them two small cabinets with drawers below. The glass doors of the bookcases were of small panes, and the books within were in exquisite bindings. Topping the cases were several splendid bronze busts. The furniture was completed by a round mahogany center-table, several small chairs and three tapestried armchairs. When Mrs. Llewellyn had seated herself in one the clairvoyant took another. His agitation was so extreme that had she been capable of fear it would almost have frightened her; her curiosity it greatly piqued. He was as pale as a swarthy man can be, his lips bloodless and twitching, dry and moistening themselves one against the other as he mechanically swallowed in his nervousness. She herself was perturbed in soul, but an eye less practised than his would have discerned no signs of emotion beneath her easy exterior. They faced each other in silence for some breaths; then he spoke:
“For what purpose have you come here?”
“To consult you,” she answered. “Is it astonishing? Do not all sorts of persons come to consult you?”
“All sorts,” he replied. “But none such as you. Never any such as you.”
“I have come, it seems,” she said simply, “and to consult you.”
“In what way do you mean to consult me?” he queried. “People consult me in various ways.”
“I had in mind,” she said, “the answers you give by writing on the inside of a shut slate.”
“You have come to the wrong man,” he said harshly, with an obvious effort that made his voice unnatural. “Go elsewhere,” and he rose.
She gazed at him in astonishment without moving. “Why do you say that?” she demanded.
He opened each of the three doors, looked outside and then made sure that each was latched. He looked out of the window, glancing at each of the other windows visible from it. He hobbled once or twice up and down the room, mopping his forehead and face with his handkerchief; then he seated himself again.
“Mrs. Llewellyn,” he said, “I must request your promise of entire and permanent secrecy for what I am about to tell you.”
“Anyone would suppose,” she said, “that you were the client and I the clairvoyant.”
“Acknowledging that,” he replied. “Let it pass, I beg of you. I have told you that you have come to the wrong man. I bade you go elsewhere. You ask for an explanation. I have fortified myself to give it to you. But I must have your pledge of silence if you desire an explanation.”
“I do desire it and you have my promise.
He looked around the room with the movement of a rat in a cage. His eyes met hers, but shifted uneasily, and his shamefaced gaze fell to the floor. His hands clutched each other upon his lame knee.
“Madame,” he said, “I tell you to go elsewhere because I am a charlatan, an impostor. My trances are mere pretense, the method of my replies a farcical mummery, the answers transparent concoctions from the hints I extract from my dupes.”
“You say this to try me,” she cried; “you are subjecting me to some sort of test.”
“Madame,” he said, “look at me. Am I like a man playing a part? Do I not look in earnest?” She regarded him, convinced.
“But,” she wondered. “Why do you thrust this confession upon me?”
“I fear,” he hesitated, “that a truthful answer to that question would displease you.”
“Your behavior,” she said, “and your utterances are so unexpected and amazing to me, coming here as I have, that I must request an explanation.”
Vargas straightened himself in his chair and looked her in the eyes, not aggressively, but timidly. He spoke in a low voice.
“Madame,” he said solemnly, “I have told you the truth about myself because you are the one human being whom I am unwilling to harm, wrong or cheat.”
“You mean,”— she broke off, bridling. “Ah, Madame,” he cried, “I mean nothing that has in it any tinge of anything that might offend you. What does the north star know or care how many frail, storm-tossed barks struggle to steer by it? Is it any the less radiant, pure, high because so many to whom it is and shall remain forever unattainable strive to win from its rays guidance towards havens of safety? A woman such as you cannot guess, much less know, to how many she is the one abiding heavenly beacon. How could you, who need no such help from without, realize what the mere sight of you afar off must mean to natures not blest with such a heritage of goodness? How many have been strengthened at sight of your face, wherein they could not but see the visible outward expression of that inward peace and serenity that comes from right instincts unswervingly adhering to noble ideals? You have been to me the incarnate token of the existence of that righteousness to which I might not attain.”
Mrs. Llewellyn had borne his torrent of verbiage with a look of intolerant toleration, of haughty displeasure curbed by astonishment. When he paused for breath she said, in a voice half angry, half repressed:
“I quite understand you, I have heard enough, I have heard altogether too much of this; we will change the subject, if you please.”
“I spoke at your command,” Vargas apologized, abashed, “and only to convince you of my sincerity in telling you that I am not worthy of being consulted by you.”
“But,” she protested, carried away by her surprise, “you are called the greatest clairvoyant on earth.”
“And I have schemed, advertised lavishly, spent money like water, bribed reporters, bought editors, cajoled managers, hoodwinked owners and won over their wives and daughters through laborious years to produce that impression. It is no growth of accident, no spontaneous recognition of self-evident merit.
“But,” she argued, “are you a fiend doing all this for the delight of deceiving for deception’s sake? Are you a man wealthy by inheritance and choosing this form of activity for the pleasure it gives you?”
“By no means Madame,” he denied, “I live by my wits.”
“Your surroundings tell me that you live well,” she suggested. “Better than my surroundings reveal,” he rejoined.
“Then your wits are good wits,” she ventured.
“None better of their kind on earth,” he naïvely admitted, wholly off his guard. “And they are not overtaxed?” she asked.
“Deception is not hard,” he told her, “the world is full of fools and even the sensible are easy to deceive.”
“From what I have read,” she continued, “you do not deceive. Your advice is good. Your precepts guide your clients right. Your suggestions lead to success. Your predictions come to pass, your conjectures are verified.”
“All that is true enough,” he allowed. “Then how can you call your clients dupes, your methods mummeries, your answers lies?” She wound up triumphantly.
“I did not call my answers lies,” he disclaimed. “Mummeries I deal in and to dupes. Dupes they are all. They pour gold into my lap to tell them what they already knew if they but reasoned it out calmly with themselves. They babble to me all they need to know and pay me insensately for it when I fling back to them a patchwork of the fragments I have extracted from their stories of expectations, apprehensions and memories.”
“But if you do all that you must be a real judge of human nature, a genuine reader of hearts, a keen-brained counsellor.”
“I am all that and more,” he bragged. He had lost every trace of agitation and bore himself with a dashing self-confidence of manner, extremely engaging. “I cannot minister to a mind diseased; but I am called on to prescribe for all sorts of delusions, follies, blunders, miseries and griefs. I could count by thousands the men and women I have saved, the lives I have made happy, the difficulties I have annihilated, the aspirations I have guided aright.”
“Then you must have an immense experience of human frailties and human needs.”
“Vast, enormous, incalculable,” he declared.
“Your advice then should be valuable.”
“It is valuable,” he boasted.
“Then advise me, I am in extreme distress. I have felt that no one could help me. The belief that you might has given me a ray of hope. You have expressed a regard for me altogether extraordinary. Will it not lead you to help me?”
“Any advice and help, any service in my power you may be sure shall be yours,” he said earnestly. “But let me ask you first, how was it that you did not seek the advice of some business-man, lawyer or clergyman? You are not at all of the light-headed type of those frivolous women who flock to me and to others like me. You have common sense, unalterable principles, rat3nal instincts and personal fastidiousness, why did you not go to one of the recognized, established, honored advisers of humanity? Tell me that if you please?”
“It was because of the dream,” she faltered.
“The dream!” he exclaimed. “A dream sent you to me? What sort of a dream?”
“I had come to feel that there could be no hope for me,” she said. “But about a month ago I had a dream in which I was told ‘The seventh advertisement in the seventh column of the seventh newspaper in the seventh drawer of the linen room will point for you the way to escape from your miseries and win what you desire.’ There should have been no papers in my linen-room and it made me feel foolish to want to go and look. Also the servants knew I never went there, so I had to watch until the housekeeper was out and no maids were on that floor. Sure enough I found seven old newspapers in the seventh drawer, and on the seventh page of the lowermost paper, on the seventh column, the seventh advertisement was yours.”
“And you came to me because of that dream?”
“Yes:—and;—” she hesitated.
“Well,” he interrupted, “the reasons why you came are not so important. What I want to be sure of is this. Even if you were led to come by a mere coincidence acting on your feelings, are you now, from cool, deliberate reflection, determined to consult me? Would it not be better to take my advice at this point and go to one of the world’s regular, accredited dispensers of wisdom?”
“I have made up my mind to consult you,” she said. “It is not a passing whim, but a settled resolve.”
“Then madame,” he said, his manner wholly changing, “you must tell me all your troubles without any reservation of any kind. If I am to help you I must know your case as completely as a physician would have to know your symptoms in an illness. Tell me plainly what your trouble is.
She began to pluck at her veil with her gloved hands.
“Oh,” she gasped, “let me moisten my lips. Just a swallow of water.” For all his lameness he was surprisingly agile, as he wrenched himself up, tore open the rear door and almost instantly hobbled back with a glass and silver pitcher on a small silver tray.
She took off her veil and one glove. Several swallows were required to compose her. When she was calm again he sat looking at her with a face full of inquiry, but without uttering any questions.
“You do not know,” she said, “how hard it is to begin.”
“For the third time, Madame,” he said, “I advise you not to consult me, to go elsewhere.”
“Are you not willing to help me?” she asked, softly.
“Utterly willing,” he said, “but timid, timid as a doctor would be about prescribing for his own child. Yours is the first case ever brought to me in which I feared the effect of personal bias dimming my insight or deflecting my judgment. I have a second confession to make to you. Before you married, a man desperately in love with you came to me for help. Among other things he gave me the day, hour and minute of your birth and of his and asked me to cast both horoscopes and infer his chances of success. I had and have no faith in astrology, yet I had cast my own horoscope long before from mere curiosity. When I cast yours I was amazed at the clear indications of a connection between your fate and mine. I did not believe anything of the Babylonian absurdities, yet the coincidence struck me. Perhaps I am influenced by it yet. Under such an influence, even more than under that of my feeling for yourself, my acumen is likely to be impaired. I again advise you to go elsewhere.”
“I am all the more determined to consult you and you only.”
He bowed without any word and waited in silence for her to go on. She stared at him with big melting eyes, her face very pale.
“My husband does not love me,” she said.
“Not love you?” Vargas exclaimed, startled. “Do you mean seriously to tell me that, you who have been loved by hundreds, been adored, worshipped, courted by so many, for despair of gaining whom men have gone mad, who have had your choice of so many lovers, are not prized by the man who succeeded in winning you?”
“Yes,” she barely breathed. “He does not prize me, nor love me at all.”
“Does he love any one else?”
Out of her total paleness she flushed rose pink from throat to hair. “Yes,” she admitted.
“Who is she?” Vargas demanded.
“His first wife.”
Vargas staggered to his feet. “I did not so much as know that your husband had been married before,” he gasped, “let alone that he was divorced.”
“He was not divorced,” she stated. “Not divorced,” he quavered.
“No, he was a widower when I married him.” Vargas collapsed back into his chair.
“I do not understand,” he told her. “Does he love a dead woman?”
“Just that,” she asseverated.
“This will not do,” the clairvoyant told her, “I cannot come nearer to helping you at this rate. Try to give me the information you think necessary, not by splinters and fragments, but as a whole. Make a connected exposition of the circumstances. Begin at the beginning.
“That is harder,” she mused, “I always want to begin anything at the last chapter.”
“Woman fashion,” he commented. “You are above that in most things, I know. Try a straight story from the beginning.”
She reflected:
“The beginning,” she said, “was before I began to remember. David and I were playmates before we could talk. Boy and girl, lad and lass, we always belonged to each other, there was no love-making between us, I think, for it was all love-living. I do not believe he ever asked me to marry him or promised to marry me, or so much as talked marriage. But we had a clear understanding that we were to marry as soon as we could, at the earliest possible day. He did not merely seem wrapped up in me, he was. God knows he was all my life. Then he had no more than seen Marian Conway when he fell in love with her. There is no use in dwelling on what I suffered. He married almost at once and I gave myself up to that empty life of frivolity which made me a reigning beauty and brought me scores of suitors for none of whom I cared anything and which gave me not a particle of satisfaction. Then after they had lost both their children Marian died. David was frightfully overcome by his loss. He had loved her inconceivably and he showed his grief in the most heart-rending ways. He had the coffin opened over and over after it had been closed. He had it even lifted out of the grave and opened yet once more for one more look at her face. He spent every moment from her death to her burial in a sort of adoration of her corpse, and he did stranger things. I do not know whether it was Mr. Llewellyn’s valet who told, but at any rate the story got out among the servants. The night before she was buried he had her laid out in her coffin and a second coffin exactly like it set beside her’s. He stayed locked in the room all night. They believed he lay in the other coffin. At any rate in the morning it was closed, and he did not allow it to be opened. What he had placed in it no one knew. They said it was as heavy as the other. Two hearses, one behind the other, carried the coffins to the graveyard. Her grave is not under the monument—you have seen the monument?”
“No,” he said, “only a picture of it.”
“Well, she is not buried under it, and the second coffin was placed on hers.” She stopped.
“Go on,” he said.
“Oh,” she cried, “it is so hard to go on. But it is true. As soon as David was free I felt I had an object in life. I—I followed him, I might almost say pursued him all over the world, and when we met I courted him, and it seems strange, but I asked him to marry me. And—“ she hesitated—“he refused twice.”
“He did not want to marry you?” Vargas asked incredulously.
“He refused. It was at Cairo, that first time. He said he could not love anyone any more, all his love, his very self, was buried in Marian’s grave. The second time was at Hongkong. Then he said he always had cared for me and still cared for me, but that affection was as nothing compared to his passion for Marian, that he would never marry, and especially he would not marry me because of his regard for me, that I would not be contented or happy with him, that I was thinking of the lad he had been and that boy was buried in his wife’s grave, that he was nothing more than a walking ghost, a wraith of what he had been, a spirit condemned to wander its allotted time on earth until his hour should come and he be called to join Marian.
“The third time was in Paris. He said he was indifferent to everything, to anything, to love or hate or death or life; that he cared nothing whether he married me or not. If I cared as much as I seemed to he would marry me to please me. I told him that what I had always wanted was to be with him, that what I most wanted was to spend with him as much as possible of my time until death parted us. He said if that was what I wanted I could have it, but he was nothing more than a shadow of his old self and I was sure to be unhappy. And I am unhappy. He is generosity, gentleness, kindness and consideration itself, but he does not care. I hoped, of course, that his grief for Marian would soften, fade away and vanish, that he would cease to mourn for her, that his interest in life would reawaken, that I could win his love and that we would both be happy. But I am not. His utter indifference to me, to anything, to everything is preying on my feelings, I must do something. I shall lose my mind.”
“Is that all?” Vargas asked.
“It is enough,” she asserted, “and more than enough. Do you think it a small matter?”
“Not in the least,” he declared, “I comprehend your disappointment in respect to your hopes, your chagrin at your baffled efforts to win him back to be his old self, your pain at his inertness. But by your own showing you have no grievance against your husband.”
“That I have not,” she maintained. “Not a shadow of a grievance against him. My grievance is for him as much as for myself and against—against the way the world is made.”
Vargas looked at her for some little time.
“You do not say what you are thinking,” she interrupted.
“I am considering how to express it,” he said. “However I express it I am sure to offend you.”
“Not a bit,” she replied. “Say it at once.”
“You must realize that if I am to advise you truly I must speak plainly,” he hesitated.
“I do realize it,” she told him.
“You will then pardon what I have to say?” he ventured.
“I will pardon anything except beating about the bush,” she rapped out.
“Well,” he said slowly, “it seems to me that your coming to me, your state of mind, your trouble, as you have related it all turns upon a piece of femininity to which you should be altogether superior, to which I should have imagined you were altogether superior. You look, and I have always imagined you, free from any trace of the eternal feminine. Here it crops out. Men in general find that women in general have no feeling for the mutuality of a contract. Some women may be exceptions, but women habitually ignore the other side of a contract and see only their own side. Here you display the same defect. Mr. Llewellyn practically proposed a contract to you: on his side he to marry you, on your side, you to put up with his complete indifference to you, to everything, and be content with his actual companionship such as he is. He has fulfilled and is fulfilling his part of the contract, you seek escape from yours.”
“I think,” she snapped. “You are insufferably brutal.”
“The eternal feminine again,” he retorted.
“Worse and more of it. I told you I should offend you.”
“You do offend me. I have confidence in you, but I did not come here to be scolded or to be preached at. I do not want criticism, I want advice. Don’t tell me my shortcomings, real or imaginary, think over my troubles and my needs and tell me what to do.”
“That is plain enough,” he asserted. “Do your obvious duty. Keep your part of your contract with your husband. Give no sign that you suffer from the absence of feeling of which he warned you. Make the most of your life with him. Hope for a change in him but do not try to force it, do not rebel if it does not come.”
“I know I ought to endure,” she wailed. “But I cannot, I must do something. I must act. I must.”
“You have asked for my advice,” he said, “and you have it.”
“And what good is it to me?” she objected, “I ask for help and you string out platitudinous precepts like a snuffy, detestable old-fashioned evangelical dominie. Is this all the help you can give me?”
“All,” said Vargas humbly. “If I knew of any other it should be at your service.”
“You could consult your slate for me, as I proposed,” she suggested.
“Great heavens above!” he cried, “I have told you that all that is imposture.”
“It might turn out genuine for once,” she persisted. “Don’t people have real trances? Don’t many people believe in the answers from slates and planchettes and ouija boards?”
“Perhaps they do,” Vargas admitted. “But I never had a real trance, never saw one, never knew of one. And to my knowledge no slate or other such device ever gave any answer or wrote anything unless I or some other shuffler made it write or answer.”
“But could you not try just once for my sake,” she implored.
“Why on earth,” he demanded, “are you, so sane and sensible in appearance, so set on this mummery?”
“Because of the other dream,” she faltered.
“The other dream!” he exclaimed. “You had another dream?”
“Yes,” she said, “I was going to tell you but you interrupted me. The dream about the advertisement did not convince me. I felt it might be coincidence after all. That was more than a month ago and I disregarded it. But night before last I dreamed I was told, ‘The message on the slate will be true.’ I fought against it all day yesterday, all last night. To-day I gave up and came. I want you to consult your slate for me.”
“Madame,” he said, “this is dreadful. Can nothing make you see the truth. There is not anything supernatural about this trade of mine. It is as simple as a Punch and Judy show. There the puppets do nothing save as the showman controls them; so of my slate and of my trances.”
“But it might surprise you,” she persisted. “It might come true once. Won’t you try for me?”
“I know,” he mused, “that there is such a thing as auto-hypnotism. To humor you I might try to put myself into a genuine trance. But there would be nothing about it to help you, just a mere natural sleep, artificially induced. If I babbled in it the words would have no significance, and no writing would appear on the slate unless I put it there.”
“Just try,” she pleaded, “for my sake, to quiet me. If there is nothing, then I shall believe you.”
“There will be nothing on the slate,” he main tained. “But suppose I should mumble some fragments of words. You might take those accidental vocables for a revelation, they might become an obsession upon you, they might warp your judgment and do you great harm. I feel we should be running a foolish risk. Give up this idea of the trance and the slate, I beg of you.”
“And I beg of you to try it. You said you would do anything for me. That is what I want and nothing else.”
He shook his head, his expression crestfallen, baffled, puzzled, even alarmed.
“If you insist—” he faltered.
“I do insist,” she said.
“You wish,” he inquired, “to proceed exactly as I usually do with my simulated trance and pretended spirit replies?”
“Precisely,” she affirmed.
He opened a drawer below one of the cabinets and took out a hinged double slate. It was made like a child’s school-slate, but the rims instead of being wood, were of silver, the edges beaded and the flat of each rim chased in a pattern of pentacles, swastikas and pentagrams; a pentacle, a right-hand swastika, a pentagram, a left-hand swastika and so on all round. In the drawer was a box of fresh slate-pencils. This he held out to her and told her to choose one. At his bidding she broke off a short fragment and put it between the two Leaves of the slate, the four faces of which were entirely blank.
“Settle yourself in your chair,” he instructed her, “hold the slate in your lap. Hold it fast with both hands. First take off your other glove.”
As she did this he settled himself into the armchair opposite her, took a silver paper-knife from the table and held it upright, gazing at its point.
“You are not to move or speak until I tell you,” he directed her.
So they sat, she holding in her lap the slate shut fast upon the pencil within, her fingers enforcing its closure; he gazing intently at the point of the scimitar-shaped paper-knife. She became aware of the slow, pompous tick of a tall clock in the hallway; of faint noises, as of activity in a pantry, proceeding from somewhere in the rear of the house and barely audible through the closed window. She had expected to see him stiffen, his eyes roll up or some such manifestation appear. Nothing of the kind happened. For a long time, a very long time, she watched him staring fixedly at the sharp end of the paper-cutter. Then she saw it waver, saw his eyes close and his head, propped against the back of the armchair, move ever so little sideways, as the neck-muscles relaxed. His hands opened, the knife dropped on his knee and he was to all appearances peacefully asleep. Presently his even, regular breathing was a sound more apparent than the tick of the clock outside.
All of a sudden Mrs. Llewellyn felt herself ridiculous. Here she was, holding a childish toy, facing a strange man with whom she was entirely alone and who was apparently enjoying a needed snooze. She had an impulse to laugh and was on the point of rising, disembarrassing herself of her burden and leaving the house.
At that instant she felt a movement between the fast-shut slates. They lay level upon her lap, firmly set. She had not jarred or tilted them, yet she felt the pencil move. Felt it move and heard it too. Her mood of impatient self-contempt and irritated derision was instantly obliterated under a wave of terrified awe. She controlled a spasm of panic, an impulse to let go her hold upon her frightful charge, to scream, to run away. Rigid, trembling, breathing quick, her heart hammering her ribs, she sat, her fingers gripping the slates, listening for another movement. It came. Faintly at first, she felt and heard it, then more distinctly. Slowly, very slowly, with intervals of silence, the bit of pencil crawled, tapped and scratched about. While listening to it, and still more while listening for it, she was under so terrific a tension that she felt if nothing happened to relieve her, she must faint or shriek. When she continued listening for a long, an interminable, an unbearable time and heard nothing but the clock in the hall and Vargas’ breathing in the room, she felt she was about to do both.
Then the clairvoyant uttered a choked sound, the incipience of that feeble wailing groan or groaning wail of a sleeper in a nightmare. His feet moved, his undeformed leg stiffened, his hands clenched, his head rolled from side to side, he writhed, the effort expended at each successive groan was more and more excessive, each sound feebler and more pitiful.
Then Mrs. Llewellyn did scream.
Instantly Vargas struggled into a sitting posture, his face contorted, his eyes bulging, staring at her.
“Did I speak, did I speak?” he gasped.
Mrs. Llewellyn was past articulation, but she shook her head. “I passed into a real trance, a real trance,” he babbled.
She could only cling to the slate and gaze.
“I had a frightful dream,” Vargas panted, “I dreamed there was a message on the plate. It frightened me, but what it was has escaped me.”
“There is a message on the slate,” she managed to utter, “I heard the pencil writing.” Vargas, holding to the back of his chair, assisted himself to his feet. From her fingers, mechanically clenched on it, he gently disengaged the slate and put it on the table. Opening one of the cabinets he took out a decanter and two glasses, half filling one he placed it in her numb grasp.
“Drink that,” he dictated, draining the other full glass as he spoke.
Half dazed she obeyed him. Her face flushed angrily and the glass broke as she set it down. “You have given me brandy!” she cried in indignation.
“You needed it,” he asserted. “It will steady you, but you will not feel it. Compose yourself and we will look at the slate.”
She stood up beside him and he laid the slate open. There was writing on each leaf of it, on one side legible, on the other reversed.
“Oh,” she said and sat down heavily. He brought a small chair, set it beside hers and seated himself upon it, the slates open in his hands, before them both. Fine-lined, legible, plainly made by the point of the pencil, was the writing, on one leaf of the slates; on the other reversed writing with coarse strokes, plainly made by the splintered end, which was worn slightly at one place. All the writing was in the same individual script.
“This is not my handwriting,” said Vargas. “It is my husband’s,” she gasped. The words on the slate were: “That which is buried in that coffin is alive. If disinterred it will die.” Vargas opened the other cabinet. The inside of its door was a mirror. Before this he held the slates. On the other leaf the broad-stroked script showed the same words.
“What does it mean?” she pleaded, “oh! what does it mean?”
“It doesn’t mean anything,” said Vargas, roughly.
“How can that be,” she moaned. “It must mean something. It does mean something. I feel it does.”
“That is just the point,” he said, “that is what I feared before, and warned you of. Here are some chance words. They mean nothing, except that you or I or both of us have been intensely strung up with emotion. But if you cannot see that or be made to see that, you are lost. If you feel that they mean something, then they do mean that something to you, that that is your danger. Do not yield to it.”
“Do you mean to tell me, to try to convince me that those words, twice written, in the same handwriting, in my husband’s hand of all hands, formed upon those slates while I held them myself, came there by accident?”
“Not by accident,” he argued. “By some operation of unguessed forces set in motion by your excitement or mine or both; but blind forces, meaningless as the voices in dreams.”
“Am I to believe meaningless,” she demanded, “the voices in my dreams that sent me to that advertisement and to you and told me expect an answer from the slates, a true answer?”
“Madame,” he reasoned, “the series of coincidences is startling, but it is nothing but a series of coincidences. Try to rise superior to it.”
“And you won’t help me,” she wailed. “You won’t tell me what this message means—”
“I have told you my belief as to how it originated,” he said, “I have told you that I do not attach any other significance to it.”
“Oh,” she groaned, “I must go home.”
“Your carriage is at the door,” he said.
“My carriage!” she exclaimed. “How did it get there?”
“Not your own carriage,” he explained, “but one for you. I telephoned for it.”
“You have not left me an instant,” she asserted incredulously.
“When I brought you a glass of water I told the maid to telephone for a carriage and tell it to wait. It will be there.”
“I thank you,” she said, “and now, what do I owe you? What is your fee?” Vargas flushed all over his face and neck, a deep brownish-red.
“Mrs. Llewellyn,” he said with great dignity, “I take pay from my dupes for my fripperies of deception. But no money, not all the money on earth could pay me to do what I have done for you to-day, no sum could induce me to go through it again for anyone else. For you I would do anything. But what I have done was not done for payment, nor will anything I may do be done except for you, for whom I would do any service in my power.”
“I ask your pardon,” she said. “Where is the carriage? I shall faint if I stay here.”
Some weeks later, in the same room, the clairvoyant and the lady again faced each other.
“I had hoped never to see you again,” he said.
“Did you imagine that I could escape from the compulsion of all that series of manifestations?” she asked.
“I tried to believe that you might,” he answered.
“Have you been able to shake off its hold on you?” she demanded.
“Not entirely,” he confessed. “But dazing as the coincidences were, the effect on my emotions will wear off, like the smart of a burn; and, as one forgets the fury of past sufferings, I shall forget the turmoil of my feelings. There was no clear intelligibility, no definite significance in it at all.”
“Not in that message!” she exclaimed.
“Certainly not,” he asseverated.
“Yes there was,” she contradicted.
“Madame,” he said earnestly, “if you fancy you perceive any genuine coherence in those fortuitous words you have put the meaning there yourself, your imagination is riveting upon your soul fetters of your own forging.”
“My imagination and my soul have nothing to do with my insight into the spirit of that message,” she said calmly. “My heart cries out for help and my intellect has pondered at leisure upon what you call a fortuitous series of coincidences, a chance string of meaningless words. I see no incoherence, rather convincing coherence, in the sequence of your reading of horoscopes, my dreaming of dreams, leading up to the imperative behest given me from your slate.”
“Madame,” he cried, “this is heart-rending. I told you I dreaded the effect upon you of any sort of mummery. You forced me to it. I should have had strength to refuse you. I yielded. Now my cowardice will ruin you.”
“Was not your trance genuine?” she queried. “Entirely genuine, entirely too genuine.”
“Did not the writing appear upon the slate independent of your will or of mine?” she demanded.
“It did,” he admitted. “Can you explain how it came there?” she wound up. “Alas, no,” he confessed, shaking his head.
“You can scarcely reproach me for accepting it as a message,” she concluded triumphantly.
“I do not reproach you,” he said, “I reproach myself as culpable.”
“I rather thank you for what you have done for me,” she almost smiled at him. “It gives me hope. I have meditated carefully upon the message and I am convinced that I comprehend its meaning.”
“That is the worst possible state of mind you could get into,” he groaned. “Can I not make you realize the truth? It is not as you think you see it.”
“I do not think,” she said. “I know. I am convinced, and I mean to act on my convictions.”
“This is terrible,” he muttered. Then he controlled himself, shifted his position in his chair and asked: “And what are your convictions? What do you mean to do?”
“My conviction,” she said, “is that David’s love for Marian is in some way bound up with whatever he had buried in that coffin. I mean to have the coffin disinterred.”
“Madame,” he said, “this thing gets worse the more you tell me of it. You are in danger of coming under the domination of a fixed idea, even if you are not already under its sway. Fight against it. Shake it off.”
“There is no use in your talking that way to me,” she said. “I mean to do it. I shall do it.”
“Has your husband consented?” Vargas asked.
“He has,” she replied.
“Do you mean to tell me that he has agreed to your opening his wife’s grave?”
“He has agreed,” she asserted.
“But did he make no demur?” the clairvoyant inquired.
“He said he did not care what I did, I could do anything I pleased.”
“Was that all he said?” Vargas persisted.
“Not all,” she admitted. “He asked me if I had not told him that what I wanted in this life was to spend as much as possible of my time on earth with him, for us two to be together as much as circumstances would allow, and as long as death would permit. I told him of course I had said it, not once but over and over. He asked me if I still felt that way. I told him I did. He said it made no difference to him he was past any feelings, but if that was what I really wanted he advised me to let that grave alone.”
“Take his advice, by all means,” Vargas exclaimed. “It is good advice. You let that grave alone.”
“I am determined,” she told him. “Madame,” he said, “will you listen to me?”
“Certainly,” she replied. “If you have anything to say to the purpose. But not to fault-findings or to scoldings.”
“Mrs. Llewellyn,” Vargas began, “what happened during your former visit to me has demolished the entire structure of my spiritual existence. I had the sincerest disbelief in astrology, in prophecy, in ghosts, in apparitions, in superstitions, each and all, in supernaturalism in general, in religions, individually and collectively, in the idea of future life. Upon the most materialistic convictions my intellectual life was placid and unruffled, and my soul-life, if I had any, undisturbed by anything save occasional and very evanescent twinges of conscience over the contemptible duplicity of my way of livelihood. Intermittently only I despised myself. Mostly I only despised my dupes and generally not even that. Rather I merely smiled tolerantly at the childishness of their profitable credulity. Never did I have the remotest approach to any shadow of belief that there could be anything occult beneath or behind any such jugglery as I continually made use of. The matter of your horoscope and mine I took as mere coincidence. It might affect my feelings, never my reason; my heart, never my head. My head is involved now, my reason at fault. In the writing on that slate I am face to face with something, if not supernatural, at least preternatural. The thing is beyond our ordinary experience of the ordinary operation of those forces which make the world go. It depends upon something not yet understood, not necessarily inexplicable, but unexplained. It is uncanny. I don’t like it. Yet I do not yield to its influence. I am not swept away. If I dwell upon it, I know it will unsettle my reason. I do not mean to dwell upon it, I mean to get away from it, to ignore it, to forget it, and I counsel you to do likewise.”
“Your counsel,” she said, “has a long-winded preamble, but is entirely unacceptable.”
“I have more to say,” he went on. “Mere bewilderment of mind is not an adequate ground for action. There is a fine old proverb that says, ‘When in doubt, do nothing.’ Take its advice and your husband’s; do nothing.”
“But I am not in doubt,” she protested. “I am convinced that I was meant to come to you, that the message was meant for me, and that I know what it means. I am determined to act upon it.”
He shook his head with a gesture of despair, but continued:
“I have more yet to say and on another point. I advise you to go away from all this. You should and you can. You have your own wealth and your husband’s opulence at your disposal. You have one of the finest steam-yachts on the seas awaiting your pleasure. Much as you have traveled, the globe has many fascinating regions still new to you. Your husband and you have practically not traveled at all since your marriage. You should still hope for your husband’s recovery of his spirits by natural means. Travel is the most obvious prescription. Try that. Because your husband had not emerged from his brooding upon his loss and grief during two years of wandering alone with a valet; because he has not recovered his spirits after two years of matrimony spent in the neighborhood of his first wife’s grave, in mansions full of memories of her, is no reason for not hoping that his elasticity will revive during months or years spent with you among delightful scenes of novelty, far from anything to recall his mind to old associations.”
“I have no hope in any such attempt,” she said wearily. “When I cannot bear my life here with a mate who is no more than a likeness of the man I loved, why drag this soulless semblance about the oceans of the earth in the hope of seeing it awake to love me? Shall I expect a miracle from salt air or the rays of the Southern cross?”
“Mrs. Llewellyn,” Vargas said, “I have taken the liberty of making inquiries, quite unobtrusively, concerning your husband’s treatment of you. I find that it is the general impression that he is a very uxorious, a very loverly husband. Except the barest minimum required for his affairs, he spends his entire time with you. His best friends, his boyhood’s chums, his life-long cronies he never converses with, never chats with, hardly talks to, and for all his genial cordiality and courtesy, barely more than greets in passing. He is seldom seen at his clubs and very briefly. To all appearances he devotes himself to you wholly. You have all the external trappings of happiness: health, beauty, a devoted husband, the most desirable intimates, countless friends, luxurious surroundings, and unlimited affluence. It is for you to put life into all this, it is your duty to recall to it what you miss. You should leave no natural means untried turning to what you propose.”
“My determination is irrevocably taken,” she said. “But what do you expect to find in the coffin?” he queried.
“I have no expectations, not even any anticipations,” she said. “We may find keepsakes of some kind; there cannot be love-letters, for they scarcely separated a day after they met, or an hour after they married. There may be nothing in the coffin. But I am convinced that whatever it does or does not contain, David’s love for Marian is bound up with the closure of that coffin. I believe that if it is opened he will be released from his passion of grief and be free to love me.
“You mean practically to resort to an incantation, a sort of witchcraft. The notion is altogether unworthy of you, especially while so natural a device as travel remains untried.”
“You do not understand,” she said, “that I feel compelled to do something.”
“Is not going for a cruise doing something?” he asked.
“Practically doing nothing,” she replied. “Just being with David and watching for the change that never comes. You don’t know how that makes me feel forced to take some action.”
“I do not know,” he said, “because you have not told me.”
“I cannot tell you,” she said, “because I cannot find any words to express what I feel. I could not convey it to you, the loneliness that overwhelms me when I am alone with David. It is worse than being alone; I cannot imagine feeling so lonely lost in a wilderness, solitary in the desert, adrift on a raft in mid-ocean. Being with David, as he is, makes me feel—” (her voice sank to a whisper and her face grew pale, her lips gray) “oh, it makes me feel as if I were worse than with nobody. It makes me feel as if I were with nothing, with nothing at all.”
“I sympathize with you deeply,” said Vargas. “But all you say only deepens my conviction that your one road to safety lies in striving to overcome these feelings; your best hope is change of scene and travel. Above all let that grave alone.”
“My determination is irrevocably taken,” she repeated.
“Mrs. Llewellyn,” Vargas asked, “how, in your belief, did the writing you saw upon the slate come there?”
“I have no conception at all as to how it came there,” she replied. “None at all?” he probed.
“None definitely,” she said. “Vaguely I suppose I conceive it came there by the power of some consciousness and will beyond our ken.”
“Do you mean,” he queried, “by the intervention of a ghost, or spirit or some such disembodied entity?”
“Perhaps,” she admitted, “but I have not thought it out at all.”
“Granted a spirit,” he suggested, “might it not be a malignant sprite, an imp bent on doing you harm, upon entrapping you to your destruction?”
“I don’t credit such an idea for a moment,” she said. “The message has given me hope. Your innuendoes seek to rob me of my hope.”
“I seek to save you,” Vargas said, “to dislodge you from your fortalice of resolve.”
“For the third time,” she said, “I tell you that my determination is irrevocably taken.” Vargas awkwardly stood up. He clung to the back of a chair and gazed at her steadily. His face, from a far-off solemn look of resigned desperation gradually took on an expression of prophetic resolve.
“Pardon me,” he said, “if I must shock you. I wish to put to you a question.”
“Put it,” she said coldly.
“Mrs. Llewellyn,” the clairvoyant asked in a deep, slow voice. “Have you kept your marriage vows?”
“Sir,” she said angrily, rising. “You are insulting me.”
“Not a particle,” he persisted. “You have not answered my question.”
“To answer it is superfluous,” she said, facing him in trembling wrath. “Of course I have kept them. You know how utterly I love my husband.”
“You regard your vows as sacred?” he asked relentlessly. “Of course,” she said wearily.
“Why then,” he demanded, “do you attach less sanctity to your verbal compact with your husband? Your duty as a wife is to keep one compact as well as the other. Keep both. Do not be recalcitrant against the terms of your agreement. Endure his indifference and strive patiently to win his love. It is your duty, as much as it is your duty to keep your marriage vows.”
“You assume a role,” she said, “very unsuitable for you. Preaching misfits you, and it has no effect on me. I know and feel all this. But there is the plain meaning of that message. I shall open that grave.”
“I have done all I can,” he said dispiritedly. “I cannot dissuade you.”
“You cannot,” she said.
“How then can I serve you?” he asked. “I have not yet discovered to what I owe the honor of this second visit. Why are you here?”
“I wish you to be present at the opening of the coffin,” she said.
“Are you sure,” he demanded, “that that would not he most unseemly? The first Mrs. Llewellyn, I believe, left no near relatives. But would not even her cousins resent such an intrusion as my presence there? Would not your husband still more resent it? Would it not be in very bad taste?”
“I do not make requests,” she said, “that are in bad taste. As for my husband, he resents and will resent nothing, as he approves and will approve of nothing. My brother will be there and he will not find anything unseemly in your presence.”
“Nevertheless I hesitate to agree,” said Vargas.
“You have expressed,” said she, “a very deep regard for me, will you not do this since I ask it?”
“I will,” he said with an effort.
“Then whenever I write you and send a carriage for you, you will be there at the time named?”
“I promise,” he said.
Sometime before the appointed hour, at that spot where a driveway approached nearest to the Llewellyn monument, Vargas painfully emerged from a closed carriage, the blue shades of which were drawn down. He spoke to some one inside and shut the door. He had taken but two or three hobbling steps, when another carriage closely followed his stopped where his had stopped. Its shades were also drawn down. When its door opened a well dressed man got out. As Vargas had done he spoke to some one inside and closed the door. When he turned Vargas saw a man of usual, very conventional appearance, the sort of man visible by scores in fashionable clubs. His build and carriage were those of a man naturally jaunty in his movements. His well- fleshed, healthy face, smooth shaven except for a thick brown mustache, was such a face as lends itself naturally to expressions of good fellowship and joviality. His brown eyes were prone to merriment. But there was no sparkle in them, no geniality in his air, no springiness in his movements. He wore his brown derby a trifle, the merest trifle, to one side, but his expression was careworn, he looked haggard. He had the air of a man used to having his own way, but he held himself now without any elasticity. He looked the deformed clairvoyant up and down with one quick glance, fixed him with a direct gaze as he approached and greeted him with an engaging air of easy politeness, neither stiff nor familiar.
“My name is Palgrave,” he said, “I presume you are Mr. Vargas.”
“The same,” said the clairvoyant, with not a little constraint.
“Pleased to meet you,” said the other holding out his hand and diminishing Vargas’ embarrassment by the heartiness of his handshake. “Glad to have a chance for a talk with you. My sister has told me of her visits to you.”
Vargas controlled his expression, but shot one lightning glance at the other’s face, reading there instantly how much Mrs. Llewellyn had told her brother and how much she had not told him.
There was something very taking about Mr. Palgrave’s manner, which put Vargas completely at his ease. It was more than conciliatory, it was almost friendly, almost sympathetic. It not so much expressed readiness to admit to a confidential understanding, as gave the impression of continuing a well-established natural attitude of entire trust and complete comprehension. It had an unmistakable tinge, as unexpected as gratifying, of level esteem and unspoken gratitude.
There was a rustic seat by the path and by a common impulse both moved toward it. At the club-man’s courteous gesture, the cripple, with his unavoidable wrenching jolt, lowered himself painfully to the level of the bench. Mr. Palgrave seated himself beside him, crossed his knees and half turned toward him. He rested his left elbow on the back of the bench. His other hand held his cane, which he tapped against the side of his foot. The waiting carriages, one behind the other, were under a big elm some distance off; their drivers lay on the grass beside them. No one else was in sight except where, rather farther off in another direction, six laborers, their coats off, sat with a superintendent near them, in the shade of a Norway maple, near the Llewellyn monument; which dominated the neighborhood from its low, broad knoll.
The brief silence Mr. Palgrave broke.
“If you will pardon my saying it, you don’t look at all like my idea of a clairvoyant.” Vargas smiled a wan smile. The tone of the words was totally disarming.
“I don’t feel like my idea of a clairvoyant,” he said, “I am usually clear-sighted in any matter I take up; usually so clear-sighted in respect to any personality that my advice, as it often is, seems to my clients a mere echo of their own thoughts, a mere confirmation of their own judgments, a mere additional reason for what they would have done anyhow. I am used to touching unerringly the strongest springs of action. So far I have utterly failed to gain that clue to Mrs. Llewellyn’s character necessary to make my advice acceptable.”
“In every other respect you seem to have been as clear-sighted as possible,” Mr. Palgrave told him. “No advice could have been better nor more judiciously urged, nor more entirely disinterested.”
“Rather utterly interested,” said Vargas.
“In an altogether different sense,” said the other. “She told me. Until I saw you I was astonished that she had not resented it.”
“She did resent it, and of course,” said the cripple.
“Not as she would from any other man,” said Mr. Palgrave. “There are some things—” Vargas began. His voice thinned out and he broke off.
“Yes, I understand,” said her brother, “and I want to say that I feel under much obligation to you for the way you behaved and for the manliness and the straightforwardness of your whole attitude.”
“I am greatly complimented,” Vargas replied.
“You deserve complimenting,” said Mr. Palgrave. “You acted admirably. Your consideration, I might say your gentleness shows that you really have her best interests at heart.”
“I truly have,” said Vargas fervently, “and I am more disturbed in mind than I can express.”
“That must be a great deal,” said the clubman, a momentary gleam of his usual self, fading instantly from his eyes. “I certainly cannot express how much I am upset. I hate worry or anxiety and always put such troubles away and forget them. I can’t forget this. I have idolized my sister since we were babies. I have hardly slept since she talked to me. She won’t hear of a doctor. She don’t admit that there could be any pretext for her consulting a doctor, and I can’t talk to any one about her. I can talk to you. You seem a very sensible man. I should like to hear your opinion of her condition. Do you think her mind is unsettled?”
“Not as bad as that,” Vargas told him.
“This grave-opening idea seems to me out and out lunacy,” said the other. “Not as bad as that,” Vargas repeated. “It shows a trend of thought which may develop into something worse; but in itself it is only a foolish whim. The worst of it is that it produces a situation of great delicacy, and high tension which may have almost any sort of bad result.”
“I can’t imagine,” said Palgrave, “any rational or half rational basis for her whim. I can’t conceive what she thinks she will accomplish by opening that coffin or why she wants it opened. I was at Marian’s funeral and the two coffins made a precious lot of talk, I can tell you. I assumed that Llewellyn had some wild, sentimental notion of the second coffin waiting there for him. Constance declares it was not empty, but she won’t say what she expects to find in it and I believe she don’t say because she has no idea at all.”
“You are right,” said the clairvoyant, “she hasn’t.”
“Well,” said the other, “what do you think she will find in it?”
“I have no opinions whatever,” said Vargas, “as to whether it is empty or not or as to what may be in it. I have no basis of conjecture. But whether empty or not or whatever may be in it, I dread the effect on her. She is sure to be baffled in her hopes. Her present state of mind is a sort of reawakening in a civilized, educated, cultured woman of the primitive, childish, savage faith in sorcery, almost in rudimentary fetishism. She would not acknowledge it, but her attitude is very like that of a fetish-worshipper. Her mind does not reason. She is possessed of a blind, vague feeling that her welfare is implicated with whatever is in that coffin, and a compelling hope in the efficiency of the mere act of opening it, as a sort of magic rite. She is buoyed up with uncertainty. Whether she finds something or nothing she will be brought face to face with