Victor dressed for his party with trembling limbs. It seemed as if he had pa.s.sed through a tremendous battle wherein he had been defeated--and yet his heart was strangely light.
V
VICTOR RECEIVES A WARNING
Mrs. Joyce"s house was a stone structure of rather characterless design which stood at the intersection of a wide boulevard and one of the narrower crosstown streets, but it seemed very palatial to Victor as he wonderingly entered its looming granite portal. His mother tripped up the stairs with the air of one who feels very much at home.
A man in snuff-colored livery took his hat and coat and ushered him into a large reception-room on the left, and there his hostess found him some ten minutes later. "Come and meet my brother from California," she said, and led the way across the hall into the library, where a tall man with gray hair and mustache was talking with a dark, alert and smoothly shaven man of middle age. The one Mrs. Joyce introduced as her brother, Mr. Wood, and the other as Mr. Carew.
Victor was relieved to have Miss Wood enter and greet him cordially, for the men did not seem to value him sufficiently to include him in their conversation. Mr. Wood was reserved and the tone of Carew"s voice was cynical.
Leonora Wood was of that severe type of beauty which requires stately gowns, and Victor confessed that she was quite the finest figure of a girl he had ever met, but when Mrs. Joyce said, "You are to take Leo out to dinner" he merely bowed, resenting her amused smile.
His seat at table brought him next a very old lady--Mrs. Wood, senior--who beamed upon him with cheerful interest. There were several other women of that vague middle age which does not interest youth.
Miss Wood talked extremely well, and he became interested in spite of himself.
"I wonder how much longer we"re going to believe in "luck" and "coincidence,"" she said, after some remark of his. "Maybe it"s all thought transference or telepathy or something."
"Don"t tell me you really believe in such things. Professor Boyden says they are all a part of the spineless mysticism which is sweeping over the country."
She a.s.sumed a patronizing air. "It"s natural for undergraduates to quote their teachers. I wonder how long it will be before you will consider them all old fogies."
He rose to the defense of his hero. "Boyden will never be an old fogy.
He"s the most up-to-date man in America. He really is the only experimentalist along these lines. He"s out for the facts."
"Your mother"s Voices say he is as blind as the rest, wilfully blind."
"Do you really hold stock in my mother"s Voices?"
She gazed upon him in large-eyed wonder. "Yes, don"t you?"
"No. How can they be anything but a delusion?"
"I don"t know. I only know they are profoundly mysterious and that they tell me things which convince me. They seem to know my most secret thought. I have been _forced_ to believe in them. My aunt"s fortune has been doubled and my own income greatly augmented by their advice."
He took this up. "Tell me more about that. What did they advise you to do?"
"They advised buying certain stocks in a machine for making paper boxes and recommended the Universal Traction Company."
At this moment Mrs. Wood, senior, plucked at his sleeve. "Louise tells me you"re the son of our dear medium, Lucy Ollnee."
"I am, yes," he replied, rather ungraciously, for he was eager to revert to Leo.
"Perhaps you"re a medium yourself," the old lady pursued.
"Thank the Lord, no! I haven"t the ghost of a Voice about me."
She chuckled. "At your age one thinks only of love and dollars. When you are as old as I am the next world will interest you a great deal more than it does now. Besides, you must believe in spirits after they have made you rich. They"ve made Louise and Leo rich--I suppose you know that?"
He soon turned back to Leo. "I wish people would not talk my mother"s Voices to me. I hear nothing else now."
"It"s your mother"s "atmosphere." No one thinks of anything else when in her presence."
"Don"t you see how intolerable all that is going to be for me?" he asked, with bitter gravity. "I can see that she isn"t exactly human even to you. She"s just a sort of a freak. No one loves her or seeks her for herself alone, only for what she can do. That"s another reason why I must insist on her getting away from this. I will not have her treated like a wireless telephone."
Her eyes expressed more sympathy than she put into her voice. "I see what you mean; but, believe me, I had not thought of her in just that light, and I think you"re quite wrong about my aunt. She is really very fond of your mother."
He was eager to know more of what this clear-sighted girl had seen, but her neighbor, Mr. Carew, claimed her, and he was forced back upon Grandmother Wood, who talked of her new faith to him for nearly half an hour.
After dinner, while the ladies were in the drawing-room and the men were smoking their cigars, the perturbed youth expected to be freed from any further inquisition, for Philo Wood was apparently of that type of man who has no interest in the things he cannot turn into hard cash. The merits of a new strawboard box-machine was engaging his attention at this time, but, after a few minutes of polite discussion of the weather and other general topics, Carew, the lawyer, turned to Victor and began an interrogation which made him wince. Carew was very nice about it, but he pursued such a well-defined line of inquiry that it amounted to a cross-examination. He soon possessed himself of the fact that Victor did not approve of his mother"s way of life and that he was trying to secure employment in order to stop all further "fortune-telling" on his mother"s part. "I don"t believe in it," he reiterated.
"The amazing thing to me," interposed Wood, with quiet emphasis, "is that her predictions come true. I "play the ponies" a bit"--he smiled--"and I have tried to draw Mrs. Ollnee into partnership with me.
"You have the spooks point out the winning horse to me," said I to her, "and I"ll share the pot with you.""
"And she wouldn"t do it?" asked Carew.
Wood seemed to be highly amused. "No, she says her guides do not sanction gambling of any sort. And yet she advises Louise to buy into a new transportation scheme that looks to me like the worst kind of a gamble. My advice counts for nothing against these Voices."
"That"s true," admitted Carew. "You might as well be the west wind so far as influencing her goes. Since "Mr. Astor" b.u.t.ted into the game my services are good only in so far as they drive tandem with his! Now you say you have no belief in the thing," he said, turning again to Victor.
"How is that? How did that come about?"
"Well, in the first place, I"ve given some study to what Professor Boyden calls delusional hysteria," Victor responded.
Wood smiled cynically. "My sister won"t mind what you call it so long as it enables your mother to designate the winning stocks."
The att.i.tude of each of these men was that of watchful tolerance, and Victor chafed under their a.s.sumption of superior wisdom. He plainly perceived that Wood was using the psychic for his own ends, and this angered him. He shut up like a clam and left the room as soon as he could decently do so.
He made his way to where Leonora was sitting on a sofa in the library and took his seat beside her, with intent to continue the conversation which they had begun at the dinner, but he forgot his problems as he looked into her merry, candid eyes.
Her first word was a compliment to his mother. "How pretty she looks to-night! No one would suspect her of being "the dark and subtle siren"
of yesterday"s _Star_. Her face is positively angelic at this moment.
How beautiful she must have been as a girl! I must say you do not resemble her."
"Thank you," he said.
She laughingly explained. "I mean you are so tall and dark. You must resemble your father."
"I believe I do, although I cannot remember him."
"I wonder if he had your absurd pride. Aunt Louise tells me you absolutely refuse to accept any favor from her, and that you were practically forced into coming to dinner to-night. Is that true?"
He leaned toward her with intense seriousness. "How would you feel if you had suddenly learned that all your clothing, your food, your theater tickets--everything had been paid for in money drawn from strangers by means of--well--hypnotism."