Chapter VII: Part 7

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."

XIII

VICTOR TESTS HIS THEORY

He was still at breakfast, deeply engaged with his alluring vision, when Mrs. Joyce and his mother entered the room. As he rose to greet them Mrs. Joyce asked, "Have you seen Mr. Bartol?"

"Not yet--but he is up. I am to see him soon. Where is Leo?"

"She is not feeling very brisk this morning, and is taking her coffee in bed."

He said no more, but resumed his seat, richer by this added proof of the deep perturbation through which the girl had passed. He was disappointed, and eager to see her, but the conviction that she had been sleepless from love of him put him among the clouds. He would have forgotten his appointment with Bartol had not the maid reminded him of it. Even then he tried to avoid it. "You're sure he wanted me? Didn't he mean my mother?"

"I'm quite sure he said Mister Ollnee."

"Mother, what do you suppose he wants of me?"

"I don't know, Victor. Perhaps he wants to talk over the trial."

"Come back and tell us as soon as you can," commanded Mrs. Joyce. "I'm crazy to know what he did last night, and what he really thinks of us?"

Victor promised to report, and went away to his interview with a vague alarm disturbing the blissful self-satisfaction of the early morning.

He found Bartol seated at a big table with a writing-pad before him and four or five open volumes disposed about as if for reference. He, too, looked old and worn and rather grim, but he greeted his guest politely. "Good-morning. Have you seen your mother this morning?"

"Yes, I have just left her at breakfast."

"How is she?"

"She seems quite herself--a little pale, perhaps."

"Be seated, please. I want to go over our case with you. First of all, I want you to tell me once more, and in full detail, all you know of your mother's life. Begin at the beginning and leave nothing out. Don't theorize or try to explain--give me the facts as you have observed them."

This was not the kind of business to which a love-exalted youth would set himself, but Victor squared himself before the brooding face and deep-set eyes of his host, and entered once more upon the story of the "ghost-room," which had been the one dark spot in his childhood, and which became again in a moment the overshadowing torment of his young manhood.

As he talked the intent look of the man before him, his short, sharp, significant questions inspired him. He poured forth in eloquent and moving phrase the story of his sudden awakening to a knowledge that his mother was a paid medium, and under persecution by the press of the city. He told of his sittings with her, wherein he had savagely determined to unmask her for her own good. He admitted his complete failure. He related his experiences during the time she lay in deathly trance, and his voice lost its smooth flow as he approached the most marvelous experience of all, when the vast and murmuring wind blew through the small room and Altair came with sad, sweet face, to bewitch him and to shake his conceptions of the universe to their foundation stones. He confessed his bewilderment and confusion, and ended by saying: "It's all unnatural, diseased. I can't believe it is the real side of things."

"I wonder that you kept your head at all," remarked Bartol. "Your youth and good, hot blood protect you. Have you talked with your mother about our sitting?"

"Only a few words. She came to my room last night and told me she had only a dim recollection of what took place. She said The Voices wanted to talk to me--but I didn't want them to talk to me--and said so--and she went away."

Bartol mused. "Belief is not a matter of evidence; it is a habit of mind. I find myself unable to follow the evidence of my own senses. My tests of your mother last night convinced me at the moment that she had the right to claim supernormal powers. She seemingly turned matter into a mere abstraction, and made the learning of physicists the chatter of children." As he spoke his memory of what he had seen freshened and his excitement increased. His voice deepened and his eyes glowed. "Here are my notes of what took place, and I have spent the night in comparing my observations with those of Sir William Crookes concerning the medium Home. In a certain very real sense the phenomena I witnessed were quite as marvelous as those Crookes chronicled." He rose and began to walk up and down the room. "And yet this morning I do not believe--I cannot believe--that writing was precipitated in a closed book held in my hand, that a pen rose of its own volition and tapped upon the table.

"The tendency of any mind, any science, is to harden, to crystallize, to reach a stopping point. The student is prone to think that the knowledge of the physical universe which we have must be the larger part of all that is knowable--and that soon we will have gathered it all into our text-books. Of course this is the sheerest self-delusion. A little thought will make clear that all we know is as nothing compared to that which remains to be known. Up to ten o'clock last night I was one of those who believe that the domain of nature is pretty thoroughly mapped out, staked, and plowed by the investigator, but this morning I find my horizons again extended. It would be foolish to say that an hour's experiments and a night of reading along new lines had overturned all the landmarks of biologic science; but I confess that the world for me has greatly changed. I held in my hand last night a force _in action_ for which science has no name and no place--and yet thirty years ago Sir William Crookes wrote of this same force in the spirit with which he discussed other elements and powers, and yet his testimony is not accepted by his fellows even to-day.

"Your mother met every test cheerfully and instantly, and demonstrated to me, as Home did to Crookes, as Slade did to Zollner, that matter, as we think we know it, does not exist. She convinced me not merely of her honesty, but of her high powers as a psychic. A calm, persistent, logical purpose ran through all her manifestations, and her Voices--whatever they may mean to you--advised me to sit again with her and to have you and Miss Wood, Mrs. Joyce, and Marie always in the circle. This I intend to do. I feel at this moment as if no other business mattered. I have been here at my desk since midnight, reading, comparing notes, trying to convince myself that I have not gone suddenly mad.

"If I was not utterly deceived, if your fresh, keen young eyes are of any use whatsoever, if the words of Crookes, Wallace, Lombroso, and their like are of any weight, then we have in your mother a rare and subtle organism whose powers are of more importance than the rings of Saturn or the canals of Mars."

Victor was awed, carried out of himself and his small concerns by the deep voice of the great lawyer as he formulated his impassioned yet restrained musings. It was evident that he welcomed this opportunity of putting his thoughts into words, of ordering his words into argument. Half in reverie and half in conscious statement to the entranced youth, he poured forth his troubled soul.

"I was a materialist when your mother entered my house. I believed that the man who died went out like a candle. The grave was the end. To me the so-called revelations of Buddha, Gautama, Christ, were the vague dreams of the heart-sick, the stricken mourners of the earth--not one of them brought a beam of hope--but in this modern spirit of experimentation, in the work of Crookes and his like, I see a ray of light. Your mother's impersonations of my wife, her messages--Voices--may be due to mind-reading, to clairvoyance, but _the method of their delivery_ certainly lies beyond any known law. In that glows my hope. Grant the possibility of direct writing, of the power of the mind to _think_ its will upon paper without the aid of hand or pen, and a whole new world is opened up, the horizons of life are infinitely extended."

He paused abruptly. "I was weary of my days. Yesterday I moved as a creature of habit. This morning it seems that I have a new interest. I am convinced that in defending your mother I am defending something precious to the human race; but I must be very sure of my ground. I must scrutinize every phase of her power, and you must help me. You are young and well-trained. You have a good mind, and I am persuaded you will go far. Your mother worships you, lives for you. Now, you and I together must make such study of her mediumship as America has never seen--a study which shall have nothing to do with any ism, fad, or prejudice. Will you help me?"

Victor, overwhelmed by the confidence of the great lawyer, by the honor which this plea laid upon his young shoulders, could only stammer, "I will do my best."

Bartol thanked him. "I see now, as I never did before, that this power is a subtle, personal, psychical adjustment, and the part you are to play is a double one. First, you are her son, and your presence and influence are indispensable. Secondly, you are vigorous and alert, comparatively free from the wrecking effect of bereavement such as mine. I confess I cannot trust myself in the face of the supposed appeal of my dead. I am like the doctor who refuses to practise upon his own child--my desires blind me. At the same time I see that we cannot thrust strangers upon your mother, especially in her present excited state. What I propose is a series of private experiments, including chemical tests, instantaneous photographs, and the like, which shall convince both judge and jury of the reality of these phenomena. This case will come before my friend, Judge Matthews, and we have in him a just and penetrating mind. If I can make him feel my own present conviction we may rest our case safely with any unprejudiced jury."

He paused and picked up a volume from the table. "Crookes is explicit. He says he _saw_ the lath move without visible cause, he _saw_ Home thrust his hand into the hearth and stir the coals, he _saw_ the accordion play without any reason; and in all this he is sustained by other men testing each phenomenon by means of electrical registering devices. Now we must duplicate these. We must go into court armed with photographs, records, and witnesses. We will make this a _cause celebre_--doing our small part to forward this superb and fearless European movement. I intend to be both lawyer and physicist hereafter," he ended, with a smile.

That the great lawyer was now completely engaged upon his mother's defense Victor exultantly perceived, and it gave him a feeling of pride and security, but this was followed by a sense of being uprooted. The sight of this man, inspired yet confounded by what had come to him in a single sitting, brought new and disturbing force to all that had happened to himself. Was it possible that thought could be precipitated like dew upon a sheet of paper?

"Now," resumed Bartol, "I have made a further discovery. There is a brotherhood of what we may call true experimentalists--beginning with Marc, Thury, and the Count de Gasparin, and running to Flammarion and Richet, in Paris; the Dialectical Society, Sir William Crookes, Alfred Russell Wallace, Sir Oliver Lodge, in England; thence back to the Continent, to Zollner, Aksakof, Ochorowicz, De Rochas, Maxwell, Morselli, and Lombroso. I need a condensed record of these experiments, and a synopsis of each theory. Once within this group, you will learn by cross-reference the names of all those whom each of these experimentalists regard as reliable. You can work here or take the books to your room--perhaps, on the whole, Morselli's record is first in importance. Bring me a clear and full abstract of that as soon as you can."

"I do not read Italian," confessed Victor; "but Leo--Miss Wood--does; perhaps she will help me."

"Very good. Now as to the mechanical side of this matter. I have a nephew who is an expert photographer and a clever electrician. With your permission, I will send for him and see what he can do. He is a man of high standing in his profession, and a quiet personality--one that will not irritate or alarm your mother. Shall I bring him in and give her over to all?"

"Certainly. I'm sure mother wants you to have full charge."

"Very well. We will set to work at once, for our case may come up this week. At its lowest terms, the Aiken charge involves--to us--the admission that our client is highly suggestible and that she has been used as an unconscious stool-pigeon by Pettus. For the present we must proceed upon this basis. Suggestion is more or less accepted at the present time, and we may be able to get the jury to admit our plea; but I will not conceal from you the fact that your mother stands in danger of severe punishment. The _Star_ has singled her out as a scapegoat, and is behind the Aikens. They will push her hard. I do not think they will follow her here, but if they do I shall send you to my nephew's home.--Now to Morselli. We must know just where he stands on this amazing branch of biology. Will you make this synopsis to-day?"

Victor's eyes glowed with the fire of his awakened pride and resolution. "If you'll let me help you, Mr. Bartol, I'll show you what my training has been. I'm quick in some things. I will collate and put in order all the latest deductions of science--" He stopped. "But what exactly do you intend to do with my mother?"

"I mean to confine her in such wise as to demonstrate precisely what she can do and what she cannot. I must divide what is conscious from that which is unconscious. I must understand precisely how she produces these messages, voices, and faces. We are agreed that she is not _consciously_ deceptive?" He questioned Victor with a glance.

"I _know_ she is honest."

"Very well, we must demonstrate her honesty. We must photograph her so-called materializations side by side with her own body, and we must register the work of these invisible hands, and in every possible way demonstrate that she is the medium and not the originating cause of these messages. In no other way can we save her from disgrace and a prison cell."

The youth went away with a humming sound in his head. The thought of his gentle little mother herded with vile women within the gray walls of a penitentiary filled him with such horror that his face went drawn and white. "It shall not be! I will not have it so!" he said, and yet he saw no other way in which to prevent it. All depended upon the man whose impassioned words still rang in his ears, and his admiration for the lawyer rose to that love which youth yields to the highest manhood.

Mrs. Joyce met him in the hall, excited, eager. "What did he say?"

Victor passed his hand over his face in bewilderment. "I must think," he protested. "He said so much--Where is mother?"

"She is on the porch--waiting. Let us go out to her."

He followed her with troubled face, but the bright sunshine and the songs of the birds miraculously restored him. He looked up and down the piazza hoping to see Leo, but she was not in sight. He took a seat in silence, and Mrs. Joyce saw his mother grow pale in sympathy as she read the trouble in his face.

Mrs. Joyce urged him to tell what had passed between them, and he replied:

"I can't do it. All I can say is this: he believes mother is honest, and that she has some strange power. He will defend her in court; but he intends to study into the whole business very closely, and he wants us to help him."

"Of course we'll help him," responded Mrs. Joyce, readily.

Mrs. Ollnee went to the heart of the problem. "Just what does he want to do, Victor?"

"It is necessary to prove absolutely that you have nothing to do with these phenomena."

"But I do have everything to do with them," she replied; "that's what being a medium means. However, I know what he needs better than you do. He wants to prove that the messages are supra-normal. Very well, I am ready for any test."

"It will be a fierce one, mother. He intends to use electricity and machines for recording movements and instantaneous photography."

"I am willing, provided he will proceed in co-operation with your father and Watts."

"He will never do that," declared Victor. "He will not begin by granting the very thing he's trying to prove."

It was upon this most solemn conference that Leo descended, pale and restrained, and though Victor sprang up with new-born love in his face, she did not flush with responding warmth. Her mood of the moonlit walk had utterly vanished, and he found himself checked, chilled, and thrust down from his high place of exaltation.

It was as if she (ashamed of her own weakness) had resolved to punish him for presumption. He smarted under her indifference, but made no open protest, though his hand (in the pocket of his coat) rested upon the jeweled sign of her self-surrender.

She lost a little of her indifference when she learned that Bartol had been kept awake all night by the significance of the phenomena he had witnessed, and she joined heartily in declaring that he must be met in every demand. "Oh, I wish I might see the experiments," she exclaimed.

"He wishes you to do so," replied Victor, eagerly. "The Voices told him to have you in the circle, you and Mrs. Joyce--"

"And Marie," added Mrs. Ollnee. "Marie is psychic."

"When do we try?" asked Leo, meeting his eyes a little unsteadily, so it seemed to him.

Again Mrs. Ollnee answered for him. "To-night; Mr. Bartol is telephoning now, arranging for it."

"How do you know?" asked Victor.

"Your father is speaking to me."

"I hear him!" exclaimed Mrs. Joyce, listening intently.

"What does he say?" asked Leo.

Mrs. Ollnee again replied. "He says: '_Be brave--trust us. We will protect you._'"

Looking across at the girl, in whose cheeks the roses were beginning to bloom again, the youth resented the interposition of the supernatural. He was eager to approach her, to hint at the memory of her secret, sweet embrace. As he studied the exquisite curve of her lips their touch burned again upon his flesh, and he rose with sudden reassertion of himself. "Come, Leo, let's return to Morselli."

He had never called her by her first name before, and it produced a shock in them both. She looked her reproof, but he pretended not to see it, and neither Mrs. Joyce nor Mrs. Ollnee seemed to think his familiarity worthy of remark.

Leo coldly answered: "I can only give a little time. We must go home to-day."

Mrs. Joyce promptly said, "We can't desert the ship now, Leo."

"But we have nothing to wear!" the girl retorted.

"We'll send down and have some things brought up. Really, this work for Mr. Bartol is more important than clothes."

"I suppose it is," Leo admitted. "But at the same time one should have a decent regard to the conventions."

The colloquy which followed filled Victor with dismay. It appeared that Leo was really eager to get away, as if she felt herself to be in a false position. "I can't afford to drop my daily affairs in the city. Why can't these experiments be put off for a day or two."

"I don't think we ought to ask a great and busy lawyer to accommodate himself to our piffling social plans," replied Mrs. Joyce. "A few minutes ago you were wild to join these experiments, now you are crazy to go home."

Victor, who imagined himself in full possession of the reason for her pause, said nothing; but his eyes spoke, and the girl was restless under his glance.

She gave in at last. "Well, if you will send for the things I need--"

Victor had come from Bartol's study mightily resolved to do speedily and well any work that might fall to his hand, but as he found himself seated close beside the daylight girl and listening to her voice transposing Morselli into English his resolution weakened. What were ghosts, inventions, theories, compared to the satin-smooth curve of the maiden's cheek or the delicate flutter of her lashes?

Try as he would, his attention wandered. The book smelled of the clinic, the girl of the dawn. Morselli's problem was all of the night, while on every side the young lover beheld trees flashing green mirrors to the sun, and flowers riding like dainty boats on the billows of a soft western wind. Moreover, the girl's voice was like to the purling of brooks.

Twice she reproved him for his wandering wits and laggard pen, and the second time he said: "I can't help it. The time and place invite to other occupations. Let's go for a walk."

"A brave student, you are!" she mocked. "Mr. Bartol will find you a valuable aid in his scientific investigations!"

Her look, her flushed cheek, and the hint of her bosom set him a-tremble. The memory of his midnight visitor returned, filling him with springtime madness.

"Don't you make game of me," he stammered, warningly. "If you do--I'll--"

She raised an amused glance. "What? What will you do, boy?"

"Boy!" Her pose, her smile were challenges that struck home. With swift, outflung arm, he encircled her waist and drew her to his breast. "Boy, am I?"

She beat upon him, pushed him with her small hands. "Let me go, brute!"

He laughed at her, exulting in his strength. "Oh, I am a brute now, am I? Well, I'm not. I'm a man and your master. I want a kiss."

She ceased to struggle, but into her face and voice came something which paralyzed his arms. Repentant and ashamed, he released her and stood before her humbly, while she denounced him for "a rowdy with the manners of a burglar." "This ends our acquaintance," she added, and she spurned the book on the floor as if it were his worthless self.

He was scared now, and boyishly pleaded, "Don't go--don't be angry; I was only joking."

She knew better than this. She had seen elemental fire flaming from his eyes, and dared not remain. With proud lift of head she walked away, leaving him penitent, bewildered, crushed.

XIV

THE ORDEAL

In truth, Victor had not kept his head--how could he when each day brought some new temptation, some unexpected danger, or an unforeseen barrier? Was ever such a week of trial and perplexity thrust upon a youth? And the worst of it lay in the fact that there were no signs of a release from these baffling foes. Love's distress now came to add to his bewilderment and alarm.

Leo did not appear at luncheon, and her absence gave him great uneasiness till Mrs. Joyce explained that she had only gone to town to fetch some needed clothing. He still carried the little breast-pin in his pocket, but it no longer seemed the gage of a lovely girl's affection. He began to admit that he might be mistaken, and that his dream-woman and the jewel had no necessary connection. "One of the servants may have dropped it there," he now admitted; "and yet how could that be? It was under my pillow when I woke, and I am sure it was not there when I went to sleep. Perhaps I am the one who walks in sleep. Can it be possible that I took it from her room?"

It was all very puzzling, but he no longer possessed the fatuous self-conceit necessary to charge Leo with such self-abandonment as the dream and the discovery of the brooch had at first seemed to indicate. He sat among his elders at table, silent and depressed, very far from the triumphant mood of the morning, and yet the stream of his admiration set toward the absent one with ever stronger current. The most important thing in all the world, at the moment, was the winning of her forgiving smile.

Bartol was equally distraught, and though he remained politely attentive to his guests, he was plainly absorbed by some inner problem, and left to Mrs. Joyce the burden of the conversation.

Mrs. Ollnee, listless and remote, glanced at her host occasionally in the manner of one who awaits an expected sign. To her son this attitude on her part was repellant, for he understood it to mean that she was neither mother nor guest, but an instrument. He wondered whether Bartol had not, by some overmastering power of the mind, already assumed control of her thoughts as well as of her actions; and he chafed under the pressure of his host's abstraction. "Oh, why can't she quit this business? She must stop it!" he furiously declared.

Altogether they made a serious and restrained company, and all felt the loss of Leo. As the meal progressed Mrs. Joyce tried to secure from Bartol some notion of what his plans were, and he gravely replied:

"None of you must know. No one shall enter my 'ghost-room' till I am ready for my tests. In fact, I think I shall send you all out for a drive this afternoon so that you may not even _hear_ the tap of a hammer."

Victor protested that he ought to study, and to this Bartol replied: "Very well. Take a book with you, but go off the farm. I want to be able to say that not one of the persons most interested were on the place while my preparations were going on."

In truth, the man of law was not merely puzzled by the method of transmitting the messages; he had been profoundly affected by the words themselves. His wife and daughter had apparently spoken to him again, each in distinctive way, upon matters which no one but himself could recognize.

But it was not alone what he had himself seen and heard and felt. The reading to which he had set himself had opened a new world of science for him. He was amazed at the enormous amount of direct evidence gathered and presented by careful men. Chemists applying the methods of the retort, biologists working in their own laboratories, psychologists and medical experts experimenting as upon a clinical subject, presented the same or similar facts. In Austria, in Russia, in England, the results were identical. To his mind, accustomed to sift and relate evidence, the most convincing thing of all was the substantial agreement of each and all of these investigators. In a certain sense the sneer of the faithful was deserved. These men of X-ray penetration and electrical annunciators had succeeded only in paralleling the phenomena of the early days of the healer and the magician.

At its lowest terms--or, as some would say, at its highest terms--Mrs. Ollnee's power was related to a sort of transcendental physics. Her magic refilled the most ordinary block of wood or crumb of granite with all its ancient potency. It widened and deepened the physical universe inimitably. It discovered the human organism to be unspeakably subtle and complicate, and made of the soul a visible demonstrable entity. Unthinkably swift as are the vibrations of the radium ray, this substance called the brain is capable of receiving, recording, giving off still more intricate and marvelous motions. Of what avail to call it "material"?

At times he glimpsed (as through a narrow opening) unknown regions of space, not of three or four dimensions, but an infinite number of worlds within worlds interpenetrating, undying, yet forever changing. At such moments he perceived that the scientists of to-day were but children groping among the set scenery of a dark stage, their text-books like their Bibles, the records of the bewildered and stumbling myriads of the past.

"How absurd," he said, "to attempt to make the present conform with the past! The Hebrew scriptures, the Vedas, the Sagas of the North, are all useful as records of the aspirations of primitive men, but the real understanding of the universe is to be obtained now or in the future. The present contains all that the past has possessed and more. Men are less of the beast and more of the spirit. Their powers have intensified, grown psychic, compelling, revealing, and yet the mystery of the universe remains and must remain."

In such ways and others his mind ran as he read swiftly through the wondrous record of experiments made in Rome, in Naples, in Milan. He liked these Italians better than the greatest of the Englishmen for the reason that they uttered no apology to the Pope. They proceeded on the assumption that they were biologists, not priests. They had no care whether their discoveries harmonized with some man's Bible, or whether they did not. The question was simple: Could the human organism put forth from itself a supernumerary hand or arm? Could it project an etheric double of itself? Could it interpenetrate matter?

Along these lines he proposed (with Victor's aid) to study his psychic guest. He had lost sight of the fact that he was to be her defender in court--or if he remembered it, it was only as a secondary consideration. He had no faintest hope of directly proving the continued existence of his wife and children; but he could see that a demonstration of the power of the living body to project and maintain at a distance an etheric brain, a voice, made (by inference) a belief in immortality possible.

This belief, this possible life of the soul, had nothing to do with the systems of celestial cosmogony built up by the followers of Christ or Gautama, its world was not peopled with angels, gods, or devils; it was merely another and inter-fusing material region wherein the spirit of man could move, retaining at least a dim memory of the grosser material plane from which it fled. It was inconceivable, of course, when scrutinized directly; but he caught a glint of its wonders now and then, as if from the corner of his half-closed eye.

These physical marvels were kept very near to him, as he sat at his desk, by minute tappings on his penholder, on his chair-back, and by fairy chimes rung on the cut-glass decanter at his elbow. At times he felt the light touch of hands, and once, as he returned to his seat after a visit to the library, he found a sheet of strange parchment thrust under his book, and on this was written in exquisite old-fashioned script: "_Thou hast thy comfort and thy instrument. Hold not thy hand._" And it was signed "Aurelius."

This was all very startling; but he referred it to Mrs. Ollnee herself. To imagine it a direct message from the dead was beyond him.

At four o'clock the road-wagon brought from the station a small, alert, and business-like young fellow, accompanied by various boxes, parcels, and bags. Bartol met him at the door and took him at once to his study. Neither of them was seen again till dinner-time.

The servants were profoundly excited by all this, but were too well trained to betray their curiosity above stairs. They knew now who Mrs. Ollnee was, but they believed in their master's government and listened to the hammering in the study with impassive faces--while at their duties in the hall or dining-room--but permitted themselves endless conjecture in their own quarters. Marie alone took no part in these discussions, though she seemed more excited than any of the others.

Meanwhile, Victor watched and waited in a fever of anxiety for Leo's return. At five o'clock she came, but went directly to her room.

Marie met her tense with excitement. "Oh, Miss Leo, Master has asked me to sit in the circle to-night, and I'm scared."

"You mean Mr. Bartol has asked you?"

"Yes--Miss."

"Well, you should feel exalted, Marie. It will be a wonderful experience."

"I suppose so, Miss, but my hands are all cold and my stomach sick with thinking of it."

Leo laughed. "You're psychic, that's what's the matter with you."

"Oh, do you think so!"

"Let me take your hands." Marie gave them. Leo smiled. "Cold and wet! Yes, you are _it_! But don't let it interfere with dinner. I'm hungry as a bear. Cheer up. I'd give anything to be a psychic."

"I shall flunk it, Miss; I can't go through it, really."

"Nonsense! It will be good as a play."

Half an hour later the others came in, and Leo heard Victor's voice in the hall with a feeling of distaste. She had gone out to him during that moonlit walk, and was suffering now a natural revulsion. It had not been love; it had been (she admitted) only physical attraction, and the fault, the weakness, had been hers. His presuming upon her moment of compliance was of the nature of man. It had frightened her to discover such deeps within herself. "We are all animals at bottom," she charged, in the unnatural cynicism of youth.

Notwithstanding this mood, she clothed herself handsomely in a gown which lent beauty to the exceedingly dignified role she designed to play, and so costumed went to her aunt's room to hear the news.

Mrs. Joyce was lying down, and her voice sounded tired as she said: "We were ordered out of the house at three, and have been driving ever since. Alexander, so Marie says, has had strange men working all the afternoon on some contrivance in his study. Evidently he is going to be very scientific."

Leo exclaimed with delight. "Now we'll see if these faces and forms are real or not."

"Why, Leo! Do you doubt?"

"Yes, deep in my heart I do. I cannot quite free myself from the belief that in some way Lucy produces all these effects."

"Of course she transmits them. She's a medium."

"I don't mean it that way--and I don't mean that she cheats; but somehow I never feel as if anything real came to me direct."

Mrs. Joyce did not feel able to pursue this line of argument. "What's the matter between you and Victor?"

"Who told you anything was the matter?"

"I sensed it."

"Well, why didn't you sense the cause?"

"He's a nice boy; you mustn't ill-treat him, Leo."

"Your solicitude is misplaced; you should be concerned about me."

"You? Trust you to take care of yourself! I never knew a more self-sufficient young person. I am only waiting for some man to teach you your place."

This was a frequent subject of very plain though jocular allusion between them. "A man may--some time--but not a rowdy boy. How does Lucy take the promise of a test?"

"Very calmly. She is relying wholly on her 'band' to protect her. She feels the importance of the trial, and does not shrink from it."

The Miss Wood whom Victor met as he entered the dining-room that night was precisely the young lady he had first seen, a calm, smiling, superior person who looked down upon him with good-humored tolerance of his youth and sex, putting him into the position of the bad little boy who has promised not to do so again. She not merely loftily forgave him, she had apparently minimized the offense, and this hurt worst of all. "I'm sorry not to have been able to work to-day," she said; "but I really had to go to town."

This lofty, elderly sister air after her compliance to his arm eventually angered him. His awe, his gratitude of the morning were turned into the man's desire to be master. He set his jaws in sullen slant and bided his time. "You can't treat me in this way when we're alone," he said, beneath his breath.

Later he was hurt by her vivid interest in the young inventor, whom Bartol introduced as Stinchfield. He was a small man with a round, red face and laughing blue eyes, but he spoke with authority. His knowledge was amazing for its wide grasp, but especially for its precision. He guessed at nothing; he knew--or if he did not know he said so frankly. In the few short years of his professional career he had been associated with some of the greatest masters of matter. His acquaintances were all men of exact information and trained judgment, men who lived amid physical miracles and wrought epics in steel and stone.

Naturally he absorbed the attention of the table, for in answer to questions he touched upon his career, and his talk was absorbing. He had been a year at Panama. He had helped to survey the route for a vast Colorado irrigating tunnel, and in his spare moments had perfected a number of important inventions in automobile construction.

It was for all these reasons that Bartol had 'phoned him, urging him to come out and assist in the infinitely more important work of reducing to law the phenomena which sprang, apparently without rule or reason, from the trances of his latest and most interesting client. "Here is your chance to get a grip on the phenomena that have puzzled the world for centuries," he said.

When Mrs. Joyce asked Stinchfield if he knew anything about spirit phenomena, he replied, candidly:

"Not a thing, directly, Mrs. Joyce. Of course I have read a good deal, but I have never experimented. It is not easy to secure co-operation on the part of those gifted with these powers. The trouble seems to be they consider themselves in a sense priests, keepers of a faith, whereas I have the natural tendency to think of them in terms of physics."

Bartol, smiling, raised a hand. "I don't want the company drawn into controversy. Experts agree that argument defeats a psychic."

Mrs. Ollnee still wore the look of one who but half listens to what is said, and Mrs. Joyce slyly touched her hand with the tips of her fingers. "Do you want to go to your room?" she asked.

Mrs. Ollnee shook her head. "No, I am all right."

"We will have better results if we 'cut out' dessert," Mrs. Joyce explained to Bartol. "Over-eating has spoiled many a seance."

"Is it as physical as that?" exclaimed Stinchfield.

"I never eat when I am on a hard case," said Bartol.

Victor began to awaken to the crucial nature of the test which was about to be made of his mother's powers. This laughing young physicist was precisely the sort of man to put the screws severely on. It was all a problem in mechanics for him. Whether the psychic suffered or rejoiced in the operation did not concern him. "If she is deceiving us in any way he will discover it," the son forecasted, with a feeling of fear at his heart. "And yet how can I defend her?"

Bartol said to Mrs. Ollnee: "Would you mind dressing for the performance? I'd like you to go with Mrs. Joyce and Marie, and clothe yourself in all black if possible, so that I can say you came into my study not merely searched, but re-clothed."

She said, quite simply: "I have no objection at all. I am in your hands."

After the older women left the room Victor drew near to Leo with a low word. "Poor little mother! she is in the hands of the inquisition to-night."

Thrilling to the excitement of the hour, she forgot her resentful superior pose. "Isn't that little man magnificent? Why didn't you go in for civil engineering or chemistry?"

"Because no one had sense enough to advise me," he bitterly answered.

"Think where that funny little body has carried that head," she continued, still studying Stinchfield. "If he had only been given shoulders like yours--"

"I'm glad you like something about me."

"I was speaking of your body as a machine for carrying a brain around over the earth."

"You seem to think of me as having no brain."

"Oh, not quite so bad as that. You have a brain, but it's undeveloped."

"I'm growing up rapidly these days. Seems like I'd lived a year since our walk last night."

She colored a little. "Forget that and I'll forgive you."

"I can't forget that."

"Have you any idea what the tests are to be?" she asked, in an effort to change the subject.

"No, I'm outside of it all. I hope they won't scare my poor little mother out of her senses. Ought I to step in and stop it?"

"No, not unless The Voices say so. They welcome investigation--so they've always said. What I should insist on, if I were you, is plenty of time and a series of sittings."

She was speaking now in gracious mood, and he, eager to win from her a fuller expression of forgiveness, spoke again, bravely. "I hope you are not going to be angry with me?"

"Not at all," she replied, with disheartening, impersonal cordiality. "I was partly to blame. I forgot you were a hot-headed boy."

"Don't take that tone with me--I won't stand it!"

"How can you help it?" she answered, with a smile, and moved toward the end of the table where Bartol and Stinchfield still sat smoking and leisurely sipping their coffee.

The little engineer sprang up as she drew near, and stood like a soldier at attention as she said, "Are you in merciless mood to-night, Mr. Stinchfield?"

"Far from it," he responded. "I'm in a receptive mood. The fact that Mr. Bartol has found enough in this subject to wish to investigate predisposes me to open-mindedness."

"Suppose we go into the library," suggested Bartol, and they all followed him across the hall.

Leo walked with the engineer, leaving Victor in the rear, hurt and suffering sorely.

It was not so much her displayed interest in Stinchfield as her haughty disregard of himself that touched his self-esteem. Thereafter he sulked like the boy she declared him to be.

When his mother came in robed in black and looking the sad young widow he was on the verge of rebellion against the whole plan of action, but he kept silence while Bartol explained his design.

"It is customary for 'mediums' to have things their own way, but in this case Mrs. Ollnee has placed herself entirely in my hands. The tests will be made in my study." He turned the key and unlocked the door. "Mr. Stinchfield will enter first and see that the room is as we left it."

The engineer entered, and after a moment's survey called: "All is untouched. Come in."

Bartol led the way with Mrs. Ollnee, and when Victor, the last to enter, had paced slowly over the threshold Stinchfield locked the door and handed the key to his host. The inquisition was begun.

The most notable furnishing of the room was a battery of three cameras, so arranged that they could be operated instantaneously, and Mrs. Joyce asked, anxiously, "Has the band consented to this?"

"They have consented to a trial," answered Mrs. Ollnee, in a faint voice. She had grown very pale, and her hands were trembling. To Victor this seemed like the tremor of terror, and his heart was aching with pity.

On one side of the room a deep alcove lined with books had been turned into a dark-room by means of curtains, and before these draperies stood the inevitable wooden table, but beside it, inclosing a chair, was a conical cage of wire netting encircled by bands of copper.

Mrs. Joyce exclaimed, "You do not intend to cage her in that?"

"That is my intention," calmly replied Bartol.

"Have the controls consented?" asked Mrs. Joyce.

"Yes," answered Mrs. Ollnee.