"You were the vein of her heart," the old man solemnly a.s.sured him. "Her guides were forever talking of you. And now may I see her?"
Mrs. Joyce, after a moment"s hesitation, led him to the door of the room and stood aside for him to enter. After looking down into the silent face for a long time he asked, in stately fashion, "May I make momentary examination of the body?"
Mrs. Joyce glanced at Victor. "I see no objection to your feeling for her pulse or listening for her breath."
"I wish to lift her eyelids," he explained.
"You must not touch her!" Victor broke forth. "Two doctors have examined her already. Why should you?"
"Because I, too, am one of the mystic order. I am a healer. Life"s mysteries are as an open book to me."
As he spoke a folded paper appeared to develop out of thin air above the bed, and fell gently upon the coverlet.
Mrs. Joyce started. "Where did that come from?"
The healer smiled. "From the fourth dimension." Calmly taking up the folded paper, he opened it. "This is a message to you, young man."
"To me?" Victor exclaimed. "From whom?"
"It is signed "Nelson.""
"Let me see it!" demanded Mrs. Joyce.
"What does it say?" asked Victor.
Mrs. Joyce handed it to him. "Read it for yourself. It is from your grandfather."
He read: "_Your mother is with us, but she will return to you for a little while. Her work is not yet ended. Your stubborn neck must bow.
There is a great mission for you, but you must acquire wisdom. Learn that your plans are nothing, your strength puny, your pride pitiful. We love you, but we must chastise you. Do not attempt to leave the city._
"_NELSON._"
As he stood reading this letter it seemed to Victor that a cold wind blew upon him from the direction of his mother"s body, and his blood chilled. "This is some of your jugglery," he said, turning angrily upon Beebe.
"I a.s.sure you, no," replied the healer, quietly. "It came from behind the veil. It is a veritable message from the shadow world. I may have had something to do with its precipitation, for I, too, am psychic, but not in any material way did I aid the guide."
The whole affair seemed to Victor a piece of chicanery on the part of this intruder, and he bluntly said: "I wish you"d go. You can do no good here. You have no business here."
Beebe seemed not to take offense. "It"s natural in you young fellows to believe only in the world of business and pleasure, but you"ll be taught the pettiness and uselessness of all that. Your guides have a work for you to do, and the sooner you surrender to their will the better. You are fighting an invisible but overwhelming power."
He addressed Mrs. Joyce. "This message is conclusive. Mrs. Ollnee, our divine instrument, has not abandoned the body. Her spirit will return to its envelope soon." He turned back to Victor. "As for you, young sir, there is warfare and much sorrow before you. Good-day." And with lofty wafture of the hand he took himself from the room.
Not till he had pa.s.sed entirely out of hearing did Victor speak, then he burst forth. "The old fraud! I wonder how many more such visitors we are to have? I wish we could take her away from this place."
"We might take her to my house," said Mrs. Joyce, "but I would not dare to do so without the consent of the doctors."
"Did you see how that man produced that message?"
Leo replied, "It developed right out of the air."
"It was a direct materialization," confessed Mrs. Joyce. "My own feeling is that your grandfather sent it to a.s.sure us of your mother"s return."
Victor silently confronted them, his anxiety lost in wonder. He had been told spiritualists were an uneducated lot, and to have these cultured and intelligent women calmly express their acceptance of a fact so destructive of all the laws of matter as this folded note, blinded him.
He shifted the conversation. "Isn"t it horrible that I should be here without a dollar and without a single relative? I don"t even know that I have a relation in the world. My mother told me that she had a brother somewhere in the West, but I don"t think she ever gave me his address.
There must be aunts or uncles somewhere in the East, but I have never heard from them. It seems as though she had kept me purposely ignorant of her family. You"ve been very good and kind to me, Mrs. Joyce, but I can"t ask anything more of you. I can"t ask you to stay here in this gloomy little hole. Please go home. I"ll fight it out here some way alone."
"My dear boy," said Mrs. Joyce, "I insist on staying. I cannot leave Lucy in her present condition, and I refuse to leave you alone. She is coming back to you soon, and then we will plan for the future. As for the message, you will do well to take its word to heart. It is plainly a warning that you must not leave the city."
"But, Mrs. Joyce, think what it involves to believe that that letter dropped out of the air!"
"The world has grown very vast and very mysterious to me," she solemnly responded. "I"ve had even more wonderful things than that take place in my own home."
Mrs. Joyce saw that to go would be best, at least for the time, and together she and Leo went down the stairway and out into the street, leaving the stubborn youth to confront his problem alone with the phlegmatic Mrs. Post.
VII
THE RETURN OF THE SPIRIT
Youth is surrounded by mystery--nothing but magic touches him; but it is a beautiful, natural, hopeful magic. The mists of morning rise unaccountably, the rains of autumn fall without cause. The lightning, the snows, the gra.s.ses appear and vanish before the child"s eyes like magical conjurations, until at last, for the most part, he accepts these miracles as commonplace because they happen regularly and often. In a world that is incomprehensible to the greatest philosopher, the lad of twenty comes and goes unmoved by the essential irresolvability of matter.
So it had been with Victor. Under instruction he had come to speak of electricity as a fluid, of steel as a metal, as though calling them by these names explained them. He discussed the ether, calmly considering it a sort of finely attenuated jelly, something which quivered to every blow and was capable of transmitting motion instantaneously. Sound, heat, and light were modes of motion, he had been told, and these words satisfied him. Food taken into the body produced power, and this power was transmitted from the stomach to the brain, and from the brain to the muscles, and so the limbs were moved. But just how the meat and potatoes got finally from the brain to the nerves and so into the swing of a baseball bat did not trouble him. Why should it?
Life and age were mere words. Death he had heard described by clergymen as something to be prepared for, a dark and dismal event reserved for old people, but which did occasionally catch a man in his arrogant youth, generally in the midst of his sins. Life meant having a good time, a succeeding in sport, business, or love. Of course certain philosophic phrases like "continuous adjustment of the organism to the environment" and "the change of the organism from the simple to the complex" had stuck in his mind. But any real thought as to what these changes actually meant had been put aside quite properly, for the pastimes and ambitions of the student to whom study is an incidental price for a joyous hour at play.
But now, here in this room, beside the motionless body of his mother, he began to think. He had a good mind. His father had left him a rich legacy in his splendid body, but also something mental--latent to this hour--which produced an irritating impatience with the vague and the mysterious. He resented the intrusion of an insoluble element into his thinking. He was repelled by the discovery that his mother was abnormal, and from the point of view of this "ghost-room" his life at the university was becoming sweeter, more precious, more normal every hour.
Then, too, his afternoon of reading at the library had put into his mind several new and all-powerful conceptions which had germinated there like the seeds which the Indian "adept" plants in pots of sand, rising, burgeoning, blossoming on the instant. He knew the names of some of those men whose words might be counted on the side of his mother"s endowment, for they were famous in physical or moral science, but he had not known before that they admitted any real belief in the kind of things which his mother professed to perform.
The conception that the human soul was (as the ancients believed) a ponderable, potent ent.i.ty capable of separating itself from the body, came to him with overwhelming significance. "If mother still lives," he said to the nurse, "where is she? What form has she taken?"
Mrs. Post, in her own way, was capable of expressing herself. "She is not there. So much we know. Her body is here. It is like a cloak which she has thrown down. She herself is invisible, but she will return and take up her body, and then you will see it grow warm again and her eyes will light up like lamps, and she will rise and speak to you."
Of course he did not believe this. That her body was a cast-off garment was easy to comprehend, but that her spirit hovered near and would re-enter its former habitation was incredible.
All day he remained there, pacing to and fro, or sitting bent and somber over his problem. At noon he got a little lunch for himself and for the nurse. At two o"clock Mrs. Joyce returned to take him for a drive in her car. But this he again refused. Thereupon she went away, promising to look in again later in the evening.
At dusk he stole down into the street to mail a letter to Frensen, wherein he had written: "I am a good deal of a broken reed to-day, but I am going to fight. I wish you were here to talk things over with me. I"m surrounded by people who believe in the supernatural, and I need some one like yourself to brace me up."
This was true. He had been thrust into the midst of those who dwelt upon the amazing and the inexplicable in human life. The city, which had been to him so vast, so ugly, and so menacing in a material way, now became mysterious in an entirely different way. He had now a sense of its infinite drama, its network of purpose. There was some comfort, however, in the thought that amid these swarms of people his own activities were inconspicuous. To-morrow he and his mother would be forgotten in some new sensation.
The air was delicately fresh and wholesome, and the faces of the girls he met had singular power to comfort him. The life of the city, sweeping on mult.i.tudinously, refreshed him like the spray of a mighty torrent foaming amid rocks and shadowed by lofty canon walls. He returned to his vigil stronger and better for this momentary communion with the crowd.
Mrs. Joyce came again at nine and insisted on remaining for the night.
She had quite thrown off her own gloom, being perfectly certain in her own mind that Lucy Ollnee would return with a marvelous story of her wanderings "on the other plane."