Clarke"s resounding voice had drawn Mrs. Lambert from her room, and she now hurried down the stairway with intent to calm him.
Serviss turned to her. "Again I beg of you, Mrs. Lambert, to consider well before you consent to this plan. Your daughter"s name will be a jest from one end of the country to the other. It doesn"t matter how sincere and earnest you are, the public will regard this challenge as a seeking for notoriety. Your daughter is about to be flung to the beasts." Seeing something unyielding in her eyes, he added, with such intensity his own heart responded: "Will you stake your daughter"s reputation, her health, her reason, upon the issue of a voice in the dark?"
"Yes, when the voice is that of her own father. He knows the future.
He will protect her. I have no fear."
There was such conviction, such immutable faith in her gentle voice, that Serviss was confounded. When he spoke, in answer, his voice was lower in key, with a cadence of hopeless appeal.
"How do you know these advisers are your husband and your father? You must be very certain of them."
"I am certain. I believe in them as I believe in my own existence."
The line of her mouth lost something of its sweetness, and Serviss, seeing this, took another tack.
"Granted these voices are genuine, they may be mistaken--rash with zeal. You wouldn"t say that they have gained infallibility--a knowledge of both past and future--merely by pa.s.sing to the shadow world?"
To this Clarke made answer: "That is precisely what we do believe.
They have predicted our future, they have laid out all our plans.
Their advice has brought us to our present high place, and we shall continue in our course, despite you or any other doubter."
"They have brought you to a very dubious sort of success," Serviss cuttingly replied, "But what about your victim? I know this city and its ways. I realize, as none of you seem to do, the wasting injustice you are about to inflict. Let me intercede--let me arrange some other plan--"
On Clarke"s face a sneering, one-sided smile crept as he answered: "You are too late. Our plans are made, our programme published."
"What do you mean?"
"The reporters have just been here. The notice of my speech and a broad hint of the nature of my challenge will appear in four of the leading papers to-morrow morning--"
"But Viola"s--Miss Lambert"s name! You surely haven"t used that?"
"Oh no. That is to follow. The challenge, with her name and defiance, form the climax to my oration." He swelled with pride as he spoke, as if visualizing himself on the platform, the centre of thousands of eyes, the champion of reviving faith.
"Thank G.o.d for your vanity! There is still time for some one to intervene," responded Serviss, minded to thrust him through.
Pratt shouldered in again. "What have you got to do with it, anyway?
Who asked you to interfere?"
"The chief person concerned--Miss Lambert herself."
Pratt was about to utter some further insult when Clarke diplomatically interposed. "We want you to have a part in the work, Dr. Serviss. We will welcome you to a committee of investigation, but we cannot permit you to interfere with our plan. The "Forces" are bent on the work, and they are inexorable."
"It is you who are inexorable," replied the young scientist--"you and this deluded mother."
This rapid dialogue had taken place in the wide hall just beneath the huge chandelier whose light fell on Serviss"s white forehead and square, determined face. Pratt was confronting him with lowering brow, a bear-like stoop in his shoulders, and the muttering growl of his voice was again filling the room as Viola appeared upon the great stairway. She came slowly, with one slim hand on the railing, as though feeling her way, and at every step mysterious, jarring sounds came from beneath her feet and from the walls; her eyes were shut, her chin lifted, and on her face, white and tense, lay the expression of a sorrowful dreamer. Her mouth, drooping at the corners, was pitiful to see. All her vivid youth, her flaming rebellion, had been frozen into soulless calm by the implacable powers which reigned above and beneath her in the dark.
In horror and fierce, impotent rage, Serviss watched her descend. It was plain that she was again in the grasp of some soul stronger than herself; and he believed this obsession, close akin to madness, to be due to a living, overmastering magician--to Clarke, whose voice broke the silence. "There is your answer!" he called, and his voice rang out, with triumphant glee. "Her "guides" have brought her to show you the folly of human interference. She is only an instrument like myself--clay to the hands of the invisible potters."
Once again a flaming desire to seize the girl with protecting hands filled Serviss"s young and chivalric heart; but a sense of his essential helplessness, a knowledge of his utter lack of authority, stayed his arm, while his blaze of resolution went out like a flame in the wind. Sick with horror, he stood till Mrs. Lambert took Viola in her arms, then, in a voice that shook with pa.s.sion, he said: "Madam, your faith in your spirits pa.s.ses my understanding. Only devils from h.e.l.l would demand such torture from a blithe young girl."
And so saying, with shame of his impotence, and with a full realization of Viola"s mental bondage to Anthony Clarke, he turned away. "I now understand Britt"s words--only the authority of the husband can save her from her all-surrounding foes," and at the moment his fist doubled with desire to claim and exercise that power.
X
MORTON SENDS A TELEGRAM
The harsh reality of the outside world was like the hard-driven, acrid spray of the ocean in a wintry storm, it stung yet calmed with its grateful, stern menace. A thin drizzle of rain was beginning to fall, and the avenues were filled with the furious clamor of belated traffic. The clangor of the overhead trains--almost incessant at this hour--benumbed the ear, and every side-street rang with the hideous clatter of drays and express-carts, each driver, each motor-man, laboring in a kind of sullen frenzy to reach his barn before six o"clock, while truculent pedestrians, tired, eager, and exacting, trod upon one another"s heels in their homeward haste.
This tumult of turbulent, coa.r.s.e, unthinking life seemed at the moment not merely normal but wholesome and admirable by force of contrast with the morbid, unnatural, and useless scenes through which he had just pa.s.sed. Better to be a burly, unreflecting truckman than a troubled, unresting soul like Anthony Clarke, "Yes, and better for Viola Lambert to be the wife of one of these rude animal types, suffering a life of physical hardship, than to continue the sport of a man who, having lost the true values out of his own life, is remorselessly distorting those of the woman he professes to love."
His mind then went back, by the same law of contrast, to his momentous ride across the Sulphur Spring trail. "To think on how small a chance my share in this girl"s singular history hangs! Had I taken "the cut-off," as my guide suggested, had I camped in the log-cabin at the head of the canon, or had I saddled up the next morning and ridden over to Silver City, as I had planned, we would never have met; and I would not now be involved in her hysterical career."
But he had done neither of these things. He had camped in the town, he had sought her, and in this seeking lay something more than chance.
His second meeting was an acknowledgment of his youth and her beauty.
She had held him in the village day by day, because she was lithe of body and fair of face and because her eyes were unaccountably wistful.
Yes, he had sought her that night when the river sang with joyous, immemorial clamor, and the lamp beckoned like a hand. He had gone to her for diversion--that he now acknowledged--and he had grown each day more deeply concerned with her life and its burdens.
And now here she was at his door, more dangerously enthralling than ever, involved in a snare of most intricate pattern, calling upon him through some hidden affinity of their natures as no woman had ever called him before--calling so powerfully, so insistently, that to save her from her peril, as pressing as it was intangible, seemed the one and only task at his hand.
In this mood, sustained by the memory of her anguished face, he sent a telegram to Lambert, urging him to come at once to the relief of his wife and daughter.
He did not appreciate the full force of this act until he left the office and resumed his walk homeward. Then, like a shock from a battery, came the realisation. "I have now definitely intervened; but how weakly, how ingloriously!"
This thought grew less agreeable and more humiliating as he dwelt upon the possible consequences. "Will Lambert remember me? Will he take my warning to heart?"
In imagination he followed the small envelope as it pa.s.sed to the hand of a messenger and started up that fearsome, splendid trail towards the mill. The world was stern and cold and white and still up there in the Basin--winter yet reigned in majesty and the pathways were deep sunk in heaped and sculptured snows.
Up to the half-buried office the courier would ride, and with a cheery halloo call Lambert to the door. What would he think upon receiving such an imperative summons from a stranger? "Did I make the situation clear? He may imagine that some dire physical disaster has overtaken his women. But that would be true. Their peril is none the less real because intangible, and yet my part in it may not seem either wise or manly."
In truth every step towards his own door removed him an emotional league from the scene in the hall, and as the throb of Viola"s agonized voice died out of his ears the crisis in her life grew hysteric, unsubstantial, and at last unreal. Her gestures, her plea for help, her descent of the stairway, came to seem like the climaxes in a singular drama powerfully acted. "G.o.d! what an actress--if she _is_ an actress!" he exclaimed, as the tragic intensity of her face returned upon him.
He pa.s.sed from this to the next phase of his development. In a certain good-humored way he had accepted his friend Tolman"s theories of hypnotic control, but had never taken them into serious account till this moment. He was forced now to admit the entire truth of "suggestion" or to charge this girl, whose character so bewitched him, with being an impostor. She was either a marvellous artist in deception or Clarke controlled her through some sinister and little-understood law of the mind. What else could have brought her creeping like a somnambulist down the stairway to demonstrate her tormentor"s demoniacal sovereignty? And if he could call her to him in such wise, then all the weird tales of the romancers, all the half-mythical doings of Mesmer and Charcot, were true, and the feet of Bulwer Lytton"s remorseless lover solidly set upon the rock of fact.
"My school of thought is very exact and very dogmatic. It prides itself on not looking beyond its nose. There is no room in our text-books for this girl and her claims. But--" He stood on the corner and surveyed the familiar scene, the rushing, commonplace men, the commonplace horses, the commonplace, ugly walls and signs, and for an instant they lost substance, became as shadowy as drifting mist, the men were of no more bulk than phantoms, the walls and pavements but the effluvia of the commonplace perceiving mind. All were as transitory as smoke, as illusionary as the opium-eater"s mid-day dream. What did it signify--this mad rush to get round a corner to creep into a hole? Why should he trouble himself about one of the millions of women, evanescent as b.u.t.terflies, with which the earth continually replenished its swarms of men?
He walked on, eager to return to his own little nest, to his books, his easy-chair, his glowing fire. What folly to go out of his own life, to profess accountability for the welfare of a girl whom he had seen but a few hours in all his life. Why trouble to explain her case?
Was it worth while to dethrone Spencer in order to defend the action of a child"s disordered mind.
This mood gave way to one far less philosophical--he permitted himself a moment of exultation over his youth. Science had not yet taken out of him the nerves that leap to the touch of a woman"s palm--the right woman. Ten years" deep, patient, absorbing dissection of pathologic tissue had not rendered the gloss and glow of a girl"s cheek less velvet-soft. On the contrary, the healthy, wholesome flesh, the matured beauty of this mountain maid seemed of more worth than any fame to be wrung from the n.i.g.g.ard hands of the Royal Academy. The absorption of the true scientist was completely broken up. "Love is worth while," he said, in answer to himself, "and to serve others the only solace in the end."
XI
DR. BRITT PAYS HIS DINNER-CALL