Serviss had listened to Britt with growing pain and indignation--pain at thought of Viola"s undoing, indignation that the mother and her physician could so complacently join in the dark proceedings. "Of course, you took hold of the case."
"I tried to, but Mrs. Lambert and Clarke would not admit that the girl was in need of my care. They invited me to join the circle as a spectator, which I did. I am still the onlooker--merely."
"You don"t mean to say they are still experimenting with her?"
"You may call it that. They sit regularly two or three nights each week. Clarke is preparing to renounce his pulpit and startle the world by a book on "spiritism," as he calls his faith. The girl is his source of thunder."
Serviss sank back into his chair and darkly pondered. "That explains a number of very strange words and actions on the girl"s part. What is her att.i.tude? She seemed to me extremely discontented and unhappy."
"She _is_ unhappy. She understands her situation and has moments of rebellion. She knows that she is cut off from her rightful share in the world of young people, and feels accursed."
"I can understand that, and several things she said to me corroborate your a.n.a.lysis of her feeling. But tell me--you have attended these sittings--what takes place--what does the girl profess to do?"
"I don"t know. I can"t determine Clarke"s share in the hocus-pocus. It all takes place in the dark."
"It always does. It belongs there."
"Many of the good old "stunts" of the professional medium are reproduced. Lights dance about, guitars are played, chairs nose about your knees, hands are laid on your cheek, and so on."
"You don"t think she is wilfully tricking?" Serviss asked this with manifest anxiety.
"There"s every inducement--darkness, deeply anxious friends. It would not be strange if she did "help on" now and then."
"What a deplorable thing!"
"And yet I"m not so sure that she wilfully deceives, though I have detected her in fraud. Probably the whole thing began in some childish disorder which threw her system out of balance. There are hundreds of such cases in medical literature. She was "possessed," as of old, with a sort of devilish "secondary personality." She probably wrote treatises left-handed and upside-down. They often begin that way. The mother, lately bereaved, was convinced of her daughter"s occult powers. She nursed the delusion, formed a circle, sat in the darkness, petting the girl when things happened, mourning when the walls were silent--and there you are! "Sludge the Medium" all over again, in a small way. Probably the girl didn"t intend to deceive anybody at first, but she was tolled along from one fakery to another, till at last she found herself powerless in the grasp of her self-induced coma. She is anxious to escape her slavery; she revolts, and is most unhappy, but sees no way out. That"s my present understanding of the case. Now, what is your advice? What can I do? I am deeply interested in the girl, but I have no authority to act."
"You shock and disgust me," said Serviss, profoundly moved. "The girl seems too fine for such chicanery. Who is this man Clarke?"
"He was a sensational preacher in Brooklyn a few years ago, but a hemorrhage in the pulpit cut short his career in the East. He came out here and got better, but his wife, who had a weak heart, couldn"t stand the alt.i.tude. She died--a sacrifice to her husband. He"s the kind of a man who demands sacrifice. After his wife"s death, he fairly lived at the Lambert cottage, and is now in full control. The girl"s will is so weakened that she is but a puppet in the grasp of his powerful personality."
Serviss was now absorbed in reconstructing his conception of Viola.
Her situation appealed to him with the greatest poignancy, but his ability to help her seemed gone. Fair as she looked, she was to be avoided, as one tainted with leprosy. His impression that first afternoon had been true--she was beleaguered, if not lost.
Britt was saying: "If the girl were under age I"d appeal to the health authorities of the state--I really would, much as I like Mrs.
Lambert--but she is of age, and, what is more to the point, Clarke has won her love and confidence, and what can you do? He fills her horizon, and the mother favors him. He talks to her of her daughter"s "mission to the world," and such-like vapor, and has the girl herself half convinced that her cataleptic states are of divine origin. I confess I haven"t felt free to make any real tests--you can"t treat her like a professional, you know--but she seems to have induced by long practice a genuine coma, and until some clamp is applied I can"t say whether she or Clarke is the chief offender. Now what would you do?"
Serviss burned with the heat of his anger. "Don"t reveal to me any more of this wretched business. I can"t advise. If you, her physician, and Lambert, her step-father, can"t put a stop to it, what can I, a pa.s.sing stranger, do? I don"t want to know anything more about it.
Why, man, it"s diabolical! To warp and imprison a girl like that! To think of that bewitching creature as a common trickster--appalls me.
And to think that good people, millions of them, believe in such mummery! It is incredible!"
"You"d be surprised at the number of somewhat similar cases we find among our patients. Since coming here I"ve gone in for a little library of books on the subject. Every physician during his practice comes upon one or more of these abnormal cases which, as Randall says, we label, for convenience, "_hysteria_," and I"m free to say that I don"t think we"re at the bottom of the matter. Let"s be just to this girl. There are points in her favor."
Serviss protested. "Not another word. It"s too painful."
Britt persisted. "I was merely going to say that I think there is some basis for all this humb.u.g.g.e.ry. These mediums don"t start from nothing.
They nearly all begin with some abnormality. Some submerged power rises to the surface of their minds like a sea-serpent, and that distinguishes them as seers. Curious friends crowd around, then the lying begins. It"s going to be worth while to take the subject up, by-and-by. I"d do it myself if I could live in New York City." He rose. "Well, I don"t blame you for not going into this case--I wish I were clear of it myself--but I was hoping you"d had some experience that would help me." Thereupon the conversation shifted to other grounds.
After Britt went out Serviss sat in brooding uneasiness over his visitor"s sad revelations. He had known Viola Lambert but three days, and yet these revelations concerning her affected him most painfully, quite vitally. His pleasure in her and in the mother and their pretty home was utterly gone, and the breaking-off of this acquaintance left an ache in his heart.
Of course he put all this on very general grounds. "I hate to lose faith in any one. It is a shock to know that I can be so wholly deceived by appearance. Clarke is really the one to blame in the deception. I can"t believe the girl wilfully deceives, and yet Britt was explicit, and he seems to be a keen, dispa.s.sionate observer."
Thereupon he began to pack in order to take the early morning train for the East. He decided not to see her again, and posted a polite note saying he had been obliged to return to New York, and that he regretted his inability to call.
As he stood on the rear platform of his train next day, looking back up the canon towards the shining crest of Colorow, he had a craven sense of having deserted a helpless young girl in the hour of her greatest trial.
IX
ANTHONY CLARKE, EVANGEL
Mr. Britt was right. Mrs. Lambert was very fond of Clarke--had, indeed, quite taken him into her heart. He was at once son and spiritual adviser, and his wishes had the force of commands. His bereavement could not have anguished her much more keenly had Adele been her own daughter, and this affliction still lay like a mist between them, preventing even a foreboding of his impending confession of desire. Her remembrance of the beauty and high character of his wife made Viola seem doubly the child; and so when, from time to time, some busybody hinted at the minister"s marked intimacy with her daughter, she put the covert insinuation away with a frank word--"You mustn"t even think such a thing."
Viola, too, from the very beginning of their acquaintance, had admired the young minister quite as deeply as Serviss imagined, and had humbled herself before Adele as to a very wonderful lady of the mysterious outer world, whose deportment, dress, and speech had been sources of enlightenment; and when she pa.s.sed away, the land of the shadow became just that much richer, more complete in its dominion over her. Almost at once Adele spoke through the vale, saying, "I am here to help and guide."
Thus all powers of earth and heaven had combined to make Clarke the ruler of Viola Lambert"s little world. He stood between her and young Clinton Ward and all other suitors--he absorbed her thought. She admired his gifts, and trembled beneath the power of his dark eyes, his magnetic hands, and especially responded to the music of his deep voice, which was very enthralling when it took on the pleading melody of the lover. At times he filled her with such pa.s.sion of vague unrest that life became a torment, for she was of the age when the world is for the lover"s conquest, and the cadence of love"s song means most and is least understood; and yet at times she felt a fear of him which chilled her. She was struggling, too, with growing ambitions, and with an expanding knowledge of the world which was beginning to make her critical--the wonder of the child was giving place to the insight of the woman. The wish to shake off her invisible tormentors and be like other girls was in reality a demand for the right to be loved and valued for her own natural self, entirely free from the touch of spectral hands.
She was disappointed that Clarke did not understand and sympathize with this wish, but that he desired her in marriage had never once entered her mind. He was a minister, and she reverenced his office, and, besides, she considered herself but a girl, too ignorant and too trivial to be the wife of one so high in holy service.
With the coming of the young professor a new force seemed entered upon the saner side of her life. She recognized in him a master of the great outer world--the Eastern world, the world of the unafraid--and her determination to at least subordinate her "controls" had expanded swiftly to a most dangerous height during the few hours of her companionship with him. She felt that he would sympathize with her--that he would help her. The clear positiveness of his speech, his health, his humor, grew upon her each moment, and she resolved to confide in him when next they met.
Part of this upspringing revolt, this antagonism, Clarke divined, and the determination to arrest her purpose, the desire to possess her entirely and at once, excluded every other wish or plan, and to feel was to act with Anthony Clarke, for he was born to emotional experience as the sparks fly upward. He had ever been a creature of unreason, morbidly conscious of self--and naturally, for in him struggled the blood of three races. His father was Scotch, and his mother--Spanish on the spindle side and Irish by way of a most mercurial father--remained an unsolved problem all her days, even to her husband. Her laughter was as illogical as her tears. Her household could never tell what the next hour would bring forth, so ready were her sympathies, so instant her despairs. She lived all her life at the heights or the depths, with never a day of serene, womanly, reasonable action, and when she died her pa.s.sing was of the same emotional stress. She clung to earth like one whose body was about to drop into soundless deeps.
Her son had inherited all her fervency, her inconstancy of purpose, as well as her tendency to collapse under pressure. Physically he had always been of slender figure, with weak lungs, and these weaknesses he had used to free himself from work, from responsibility.
He was not a hypocrite--in that Britt was mistaken. He was by nature deeply religious. His soul aspired, at times, to high things. He was sympathetic to actual pain, and had always been morbidly in awe of death. The sight of any poor, lost, and suffering man threw him into instant, profound, and melancholy pity. A dead beetle in the road, a fly caught in a spider"s web, a young robin water-soaked and bedraggled, appalled him, even as a boy, and he pondered them with sad and questioning eyes long after his young companions had forgotten them. Where had the light of their eyes fled? he asked himself. He found no sport in killing any creature, and more than once he used all his slender force to defend a cat from stoning; and yet he was known to have joined the worst youths of his native town in secret drinking-bouts, thereby acquiring the reputation of a liar and sneak, as well as that of licentiate. At seventeen, just when the appet.i.te for liquor seemed beyond his control, a great "revivalist" won his soul, as the saying went, and at twenty-three he a.s.sumed his first pastorate.
Success as a pulpit orator was a.s.sured by the charm of his voice, the magnetism of his manner. His head was singularly handsome, and often when he spoke his face was irradiated like that of a seraph, and the women of all his congregations adored him from the first glance, embarra.s.sing him with their ardent praises. That he had remained faithful to his wife in spite of this adoration was evidence of her great beauty of character. She was, indeed, his safeguard and his hourly monitor while she lived.
For him she had sacrificed all her friends in the East. She came to the mountains without a murmur, she bore with him, cheered him, upheld him in a hundred ways--and when she died his world went black as midnight. It was as if in the midst of a monster, interminable cavern his one starlike light had gone out in his hand. For days he beat his head against the wall, crying defiant curses against his G.o.d; but in the end he sank into voiceless despair. Then it was, as he lay p.r.o.ne and pa.s.sive, that he began to hear mysterious whisperings and tappings on the walls of his cavern of despond. He rose and listened. He groped his way towards the dim light. He returned to the world of men. His faith in the Scriptures was weakened; but he soon discovered a wondrous change of heart towards those who claimed to be intermediaries between the worlds of matter and of spirit. He turned his attention to the study of the physical evidences of life after death.
Up to that moment he had given but little credence to Mrs. Lambert"s half-hearted confidences concerning her own change of faith, and, as Viola had been away at school much of the time, he had forgotten that she was concerned in the mother"s confession.
The disclosure of her powers, as he told Dr. Britt--after they were both involved in the curious case--came violently, without warning, a few days after Adele"s death. "I was sitting with Mrs. Lambert in sad conversation, seeking her aid and comfort. Viola occupied a low chair beside the shaded lamp, a book upon her knee. She was listening to me.
I had just finished saying, in deeply pa.s.sionate tones, "I would give all my hope of life for one whisper from the lips of my Adele," when the room began to darken. At first I thought the effect lay in my own brain, but a moment later I perceived that the light had actually begun to fail. We all watched it in silence for a moment, then Mrs.
Lambert remarked, "Viola, Mary forgot to fill the lamp."
"Even as she spoke a cool wind blew over my head and lay along my hands. The flame leaped into the air, the room went black, save where a pale glow coming from the street lay upon the floor. A faint rustling arose, a hand touched my cheek, soft lips brushed my ear, and a whisper that stopped the beating of my heart began. A vague, inarticulate murmur, at first; but at last I plainly heard my spirit-wife speaking in gentle reproof--"Tony, Tony, I am always with you."
"The whisper ceased. The hand was taken away. A deep sigh came to my ear. My Adele was gone! The moment of ecstasy was over. I sat stunned, inert, my brain whirling with the far-reaching import of this experience. Before I could drag myself to my feet Mrs. Lambert, practical and undisturbed, threw open the door and let the light of the street in. Only then, as I looked on Viola, lying in trance with white, set face, did I first connect her in any way with my sweet communion with Adele.
"Then, like a flash of joyous light irradiating my soul, came the conviction that she was the medium through whom my Adele had spoken--that she had opened the gates of silence for me.
"I was no longer body--I was a brain suspended in some invisible sea of force. Here was the reality of religion. Here was the answer to the anguished cry of humanity--an answer to my prayers which the Hebrew Scriptures could not give. There _was_ a life beyond the grave. The spirit _did_ persist after the decay of the body. And here in this little room, when my despair was deepest, the proof had come, blinding me with its beauty.