"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 rea.s.sertion 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 att.i.tude 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 a.s.sumed 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 ent.i.ty.
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 s.p.a.ce, 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 a.s.sumption 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, G.o.ds, 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.