Chapter 3

My lady's eyes Ensphere the skies, Abound in lovely mysteries: Behind their bars Are pent the stars, Warm Venus' glow, the shafts of Mars.

Once, murky night Shut in my sight: One glance revealed the source of light! Now, to be wise Or gay, I rise, By gazing in my lady's eyes! --_Song from The Oculist_.

The process of bringing the "Jones plane of mentality" uppermost in Mr. Amidon would not have been regarded by the masculine reader of the unregenerate sort (though to such far be it from me to appeal!) as an operation at all painful. But Mr. Amidon, I must declare, was not of the unregenerate sort.

"Now," said Madame le Claire, "sit down in the arm-chair, and in a few minutes you will feel a sensation of drowsiness. Soon you will sleep. Think with all your power that you are to sleep."

She was sitting in a very high chair, he in a low one, so that her eyes were above his. The professor was blent with the shadows of some corner, in silent self-effacement, with a note-book in his hand.

Amidon tried to think with all his power that he was to sleep; but the lights and shadows and depths of the woman's eyes drew all thoughts to them. Uncle Toby, looking for the mote in the eye of the Widow Wadman, must have felt as did our wandering Florian. Never before had he noted for more than a fleeting glance the light that lies in woman's eyes. Now those limpid orbs met his in a regard, kindly, steady, eloquent of unutterable things. He noted the dark, arched, ebon sweep of the eyebrow, the long dark lashes curved daintily upward, the shining whiteness in the corners, and the wondrous irises. The one which was gray was dark like a moonlit sky; the other, like the same sky necked with clouds, and filled with the golden smoke of some far-off conflagration; and at the inner margin of both, the black of the dilated pupils seemed to spread out into the iris in rays of feathery blackness. They seemed to him like twin worlds--great, capacious, mysterious, alluring, absorbing. Behind the feathery curtains of those irises lay all the lovely things of which he had ever thought or dreamed--the things which sculptors and poets and painters see, and seek to express. And without changing his gaze, he saw below the eyes the downy cheek, and the red lips so sweetly curved. A new thrill ran through the man, and a new light came into his eyes. Madame le Claire blushed.

"Are you thinking of going to sleep?"

"I beg your pardon," said he; "I was thinking--I am afraid I was not!"

"Try again," said she; "and please control your thoughts. Think that you--are--going--to sleep. To sleep----Sleep! Sleep!---- Slee--ee--eep!"

Now Amidon's eyes sought hers again, and held there; and the twin worlds, sphered in some slowly-turning orbit, seemed swinging in their native space. Now the cheeks and hair and mouth came out in their places, returning to distinctness like features of a face on a screen. Now the eyes became twin stars again, casting on him once more the effulgence of their binary glow.

And now eyes and face and hair, and Madame le Claire--all passed away; and Florian Amidon became as naught, and the tigrine lady and the faded professor played with the thing which had been he, as upon a machine. The pillar of Hazelhurst society, the banker now five years lost, the bewildered wretch of the sleeping-car, was now, by his own act, given over as passively as some inert instrument, body and soul, to the guidance and manipulation of this shady occultist, not four hours known to him--while outside droned the muffled roar of the human cyclone which sweeps and whirls and eddies through Manhattan. So stripped of stability was the pillar, that he was now a mere feather of humanity, self-abandoned to the clasp of the storm of the modern Babylon. Madame le Claire questioned, Amidon answered (or Something answered for him), and Professor Blatherwick wrote in his book--wrote the data, of "te Chones blane of mentality."

"Dis iss enough," said the professor, "for vunce. Pring him to!"

Madame le Claire leaned back, gave her subject a long look, and then, walking to him, took his head tenderly in her hands. With the left, she held his forehead; the fingers of the right crept insinuatingly among the curls resting on his neck, swept thence over to his brow, and down across his eyelids, closing them; and Amidon sat, senseless as a statue, and almost as still.

"Right!" said Madame le Claire sharply. "Wake!"

Amidon opened his eyes wearily.

"When are you going to begin?" said he.

"Ve are t'rough," said the professor. "Ve know it all."

"And Brassfield? Did I----?"

"You have done him notting," said the professor. "You are all recht. You need not fear----"

"And the lady--Elizabeth?" suggested Amidon, as passing to the thing of next importance.

"It is near morning," said Madame le Claire, "and you are prostrated. We are all very tired. Aaron must take you to your hotel. You must sleep. Never fear, no harm is coming to you. When you wake, come to me, and I will tell you all about it--'All Mysteries Solved,' you know. Good night. You will sleep late in the morning."

VII

ENTER THE LEGAL MIND

The need of lucre never looms so large As when 'tis gotten in some devious way: It mitigates the blackness of the charge That every nether level yielded pay.

The man who dares e'en to the prison's marge Should bring back what he went for--or should stay! The need of lucre never looms so large As when 'tis gotten in some devious way.

Men can o'erlook the stain upon the targe, If from its boss the jewel shoots its ray; Or blood upon the pirate's sable barge Covered by silks' and satins' bright array-- The need of lucre never looms so large As when 'tis gotten in some devious way. --_Rondels of the Curb_.

Morning passed to noon, and the day aged into afternoon, before Amidon rose from the deep sleep which (according to Le Claire's prediction) followed his evening with her and the professor. With that odd sense of bewilderment which the early riser feels at this violation of habit, he went into the cafe for his belated breakfast. Impatient to finish the meal so that he might haste to the promised interview, he studied the menu, and with his eye scouted the room for a waiter--failing to bestow even the slightest glance on a man seated opposite. This fact, however, did not prevent the stranger from scrutinizing Amidon's face, his dress, and even his hands, as if each minutest detail were vitally important. He even dropped his napkin so as to make an excuse for looking under the table, and thus getting a good view of Florian's boots. Finally he spoke, as if continuing a broken-off conversation.

"As I said a while ago," he remarked, "Browning falls short of being a poet, just as a marble-cutter falls short of being a sculptor. You were quoting _Love Among the Ruins_, as the train stopped at Elm Springs Junction; or was it _Evelyn_----"

Amidon's eyes, during this apparently aimless disquisition, had been drawn from his meal to the speaker. He saw an elderly gentleman, clothed in the black frock-coat and black tie of the rural lawyer of the old school. His eyes shot keen and kindly glances from the deep ambush of great white brows, and his mouth was hidden under a snowy mustache. His features made up for a somewhat marked poverty of shape by a luxuriance of ruddy color, the culminating point of which was to be found in the broad and fleshy nose. His voice, soft and gentle when he began, swelled out, as he spoke, into something of the orator's orotund. When Amidon looked at him, the speaker returned the gaze in full measure, and leaning across the table, pointed his finger at his auditor, and slowly uttered the words, "--as--the train--stopped--at--Elm Springs Junction!"

"Why, Judge Blodgett!" exclaimed Amidon, "can this be you?"

"Can it be I?" exclaimed the judge. "Can it be me! No difficulty about that. Never mind the handshaking just yet--after a while, maybe. When it comes to the can-it-be part, how about you? How about the past five years, and Jennie Baggs keeping a place for you every meal for all this time, up to the present hour? I tell you, Florian, letting me down in that case of Amidon versus Cattermole, without a scrap of evidence, and getting me licked by a young practitioner who studied in my office, was bad--was damnable; but an only sister, Florian! and not one word in five years!"

"She's well, then, Jennie is?"

"She's as well, Florian, as a woman with the sorrow you've brought to her, and the mother of two infants, can be. But why do you ask?--why do you ask?--why is it necessary to go through the work of surplusage of asking?"

"Children, eh?" said Florian. "Good for Jennie! And how's Baggs?"

"Oh, Baggs, yes--why, Baggs has come through it all with his health about unimpaired, Baggs has! But no Baggs court of inquiry is going to switch me off the examination I'm now conducting; and I tell you, Mr. Amidon, you can't dodge me. What double life took you away from home, and property, and everything?"

"Judge Blodgett," said Mr. Amidon, in that low voice which, with the English language as the medium of communication, is known as the danger-signal the world over, "the term 'double life' has a meaning which is insulting. Don't use it again."

"Well, well, Florian," said the judge, evidently pleased, "sustaining the motion to strike that out, the question remains. You aren't obliged to answer, you know; but you know, too, what not answering it means."

"Judge," said Amidon, after a long pause, "to say that I don't know where I have been, or what I have been doing, since June twenty-seventh, 1896, until yesterday morning when I came to my senses in a moving sleeping-car, won't satisfy you; but it's the truth."

The judge looked off toward the ceiling in the manner of a jurist considering some complex argument, but was silent.

"Now I have found a way," said Amidon, "of having all this explained. Come with me, and let's find out. There may be complications; I may need your help. You are the one man in all the world that I was just wishing for."

"Complications, eh?" said the judge. "Well, well! Let us see!"

And now he dropped into the old manner so well known to his companion as his office style. Piece by piece, he drew from Amidon his story. He dropped back to previous parts of the narrative, and elicited repetitions. He slurred over crucial points as if he did not see their bearing, and then artfully assumed minute variations of the tale, but was always corrected.

"The prosecution is obliged to rest its case," said he, at last. "You're not crazy, or all my studies in diseases of the mind have done me no good. Your story hangs together as no fiction could. To believe you, brands us both as lunatics. Come on and let's see what your mesmerist frauds have to say. As a specialist in facts, I'm a drowning man catching at a straw. Come on: mesmerism, or astrology, or Moqui snake-dance, it's all one to me!"

Up the stairs again, this time with Judge Blodgett, warily snuffing the air, and shy of both Bohemia and Benares. Into the presence of Madame le Claire, now gowned appropriately for the morning, and looking--extraordinary, it is true, with her party-colored hair and luminous eyes--but not so jungly as when she greeted the despairing sight of Amidon the night before.

"Madame, and sir," said the judge, "as Mr. Amidon's friend and legal adviser, I am here to protect his interests."

"So! Goot!" said the professor. "Bud te matter under gonsideration is psychical, nod beguniary. Howefer, if you are interested in te realm of te supliminal, if you care for mental science----"

"Sir," said the judge, "I may almost claim to be a specialist (so far as a country practitioner is permitted to specialize) in senile and paretic dementia, since I had the honor to represent the proponents in the will case of Snoke versus Snoke. But it's only fair to say that I regard hypnotism as humbug--only fair."

"Goot, goot!" said the professor delightedly. "To temonstrate to an honest ant indellichent skeptic, is te rarest of brifileches. Ve vill now broceed to temonstrate. Here is our friendt Herr Amidon avokened in a car after fife years of lostness; he has anodder man's dotes, anodder man's dicket, letters--unt all. He gomes to Madame le Claire ant Blatherwick. He is hypnotized out of te Amidon blane of being, ant into anodder. He is mate to gife himself avay. Now ve vill broceed to dell aboudt his life since he vas lost--is it a dest, no?"

"Huh!" snorted the judge.

"Go on," cried Amidon; "tell me the story!"

"Vell," said the professor, "for four veeks after you left Elm Springs Chunction, you vandered--not, Clara?"

"Wandered," said Clara, "and to so many places that I can't remember them. Then you found oil, or traces of it--I can't get that very plainly--on a farm at Bunn's Ferry, Pennsylvania; and bought an option on the farm. Then you opened an office in Bellevale, and have been there in the oil business ever since.

"How's he been doin' financially?" interjected the judge.

"He has made a fortune," said Clara. "I believe him to be one of the principal men of the town, socially and in a business way. He didn't tell me this, but we think the circumstances seem to indicate it."

"Te saircumstances," said the professor, filling a pause, "show it."

"How is it," said the judge, "that no one has ever heard of his Bellevale career out in Hazelhurst, if he's so prominent? We read, out there, and once in a while one of us goes outside the corporation."

"His name," said Madame le Claire, "in Bellevale is not Florian Amidon."

"What is it?" cried Amidon. "Tell it to me!"

Madame le Claire restrained him with a calm glance.

"It is Eugene Brassfield," said she.

"It is your own dotes," cried the professor gleefully, "your own dicket, your own gorrespondence!"

Amidon was feeling in his breast-pocket for something. He withdrew his hand, holding in it a letter, and looked from it to Madame le Claire questioningly.

"Oh, yes!" said she, not quite in her usual manner, "it's yours. It's from Miss Elizabeth Waldron, of Bellevale, your affianced wife."

"Aha!" said the judge. "Now will you get mad when I speak of a double life? Engaged, hey?"

"I never saw the--the lady in my life," was the reply; "so how can I be--can I be--engaged to her?"

"In te Amidon blane of gonsciousness," said the professor, "you are stranchers. In te Brassfield pairsonality, you are:--_Gott im Himmel_, you are stuck on her, stuck on her--not, Clara? Vas he not gracey? Only Clara cut it short in te temonstration; but as a luffer, in te Brassfield blane, you are vot you call hot stuff."

"You had better read the gentlemen your notes," said Madame le Claire coldly. "And please excuse me. I hope to see you both again." And with a sinuous bow, she swept from the room.

Blodgett, keenly analytical, lost no word of the professor's notes. Florian sat with the letter from Miss Waldron in his hand, lost in thought. Sometimes his face burned with blushes, sometimes it paled with anxiety. His eyes ran over the letter full of sweet ardors; and when he thought of replying to them--or leaving them unanswered--his brow went moist and his heart sick. What should he do? What could he do?

When they returned to the hotel, the judge was in a fever of excitement.

"I tell you, Florian," said he, "I believe the professor is right about this. It seems that there are precedents, you know--cases on all-fours with yours. When I went to the telephone, up there, I called up Stacy and Stacy's and asked 'em to get me Dun's and Bradstreet's report on your Bellevale business. It ought to be up here pretty soon. There may be something down there worth looking after, and needing attention."

"Perhaps," groaned Amidon. "Do you know that I'm engaged----"

"One of the things I referred to," said the judge.

"--to a lady, down there, whom I shouldn't know if I were to meet her out in the hall? If I go back to Hazelhurst, she is put under a cloud as a deserted woman--to say nothing of her feelings. And if I go back to Bellevale--my God, Judge, how can I go back, and take my place in a society where every one knows me, and I know nobody; and be a lover to a girl who may be--anything, you know; but who has the highest sort of claims on me, and a nature, I'm sure, capable of the keenest suffering or pleasure--how can I?"

"Message, sir, from Stacy and Stacy," said a messenger boy at the door.

Judge Blodgett tore open the envelope, and read the telegraphic reports.

"M--m--m----Y--e--es," said he. "It'll take diplomacy, Florian, diplomacy. But, if these reports are to be trusted, and I guess they are, you've got about ten times as much at Bellevale as you have at Hazelhurst. And, as you say, the lady has claims. As an honorable man--an engaged man, who has received the plighted troth of a pure young heart--and a good financier, this Bellevale life demands resumption at your hands. Prepare, fellow citizen, to meet the difficulties of the situation."

VIII

POISING FOR THE PLUNGE

Yea, all her words are sweet and fair, And so, mayhap, is she; But words are naught but molded air, And air and molds are free. Belike, the youth in charmed hall Some fardels sore might miss, Scanning his Beauty's household all, Or ere he gave the kiss! --_The Knyghte's Discourse to his Page_.

Now it happened that at Bellevale, the young woman whom we--with the sweet familiarity of art--have had the joy to know as Elizabeth, moved about in unconsciousness, mostly blissful, of the annihilation of Eugene Brassfield. The mails might take to Mrs. Baggs at Hazelhurst vague letters from Judge Blodgett hinting at clues and traces of Florian, preparatory to the restoration of the lost brother; but Brassfield, never anything but a wraith from the mysterious caves of the subconsciousness, was non-existent for evermore, except through the magic of Le Claire. But Elizabeth Waldron, just home from college, full of the wise unwisdom of Smith and twenty-three, and palpitating with the shock which had broken the cables by which she had so long, long ago moored herself in the safe and deep waters of the harbor of a literary and intellectual celibacy, still dreamed of the bubble personality which had vanished, although at times waves of anxious unrest swept across her bosom.

For one thing, that epistle of hers, made for his reading on the train--how could she have written it! Elizabeth's cheeks burned when she remembered it. Then she thought of the weeks of chaste dalliance between her acceptance of him and his departure, and of the _elan_ with which he had entered that safe harbor of hers, and swept her from those moorings; and the letter seemed slight return for the rites of adoration he had performed before her.

But (and now the cheeks burned once more) why, why had he not written to her as soon as he reached New York? Was he one with whom it was out of sight, out of mind? Or was he one of those business men who can not place anything more delicate than price-quotations on paper? Or--and here the cheeks paled--was he suddenly ill? She wished, after all, that she had not written it!

And one day, when a special-delivery letter came and surprised her, she ran out in the winter sun to the summer-house where she had sat so much with him, and read it in quiet. Whereupon the unrest increased, because the letter seemed as unlike Eugene as if he had copied it from some _Complete Letter Writer_.

Florian had agonized over this letter--had even tried the experiment of writing one while in the "Chones blane" under the influence of Madame le Claire; but it was too incoherent for any use--and he had done the best he could. Professor Blatherwick and Judge Blodgett were working out a code of behavior for Mr. Amidon when he should return to Bellevale. They kept him in the Brassfield personality for hours every day; but such a matter as this letter to Elizabeth, he could not intrust to them. Every day, though, he looked into the varicolored eyes of Clara and willed to sleep; and every day the operation grew less and less painful to him.

Vast and complex was the system of notes built up by the professor and the judge. They told him all about his various properties and holdings of stock; they listed the clubs and social organizations to which he belonged, and the offices he held in each. They made a directory of names mentioned by him in his abnormal state, and compiled facts about each person. It must have been very much like the copious information that we think we have about historical characters--elaborate, and the best thing possible in the absence of the real facts; but only the reflection of these people in the mind of some one else, after all. Finally the judge brought the whole to his friend, neatly typewritten, paragraphs numbered, facts tabulated, and all provided with a splendid index and system of elaborate cross-references.

"You see, my boy," said Judge Blodgett, "all any one really needs to know of his surroundings is actually very little. Otherwise, most people never could get along at all. Neander couldn't find his way to market--the greatest philosopher of his time. Now these notes tell you more--actually more--of your Bellevale life, than some folks ever find out about themselves--with a little filling in, on the spot, you know, why, they'll do first rate. For instance, under 'S' we have a man named Stevens, 'Old Stevens' you playfully call him. I figure him out to be an elderly man in some position of authority--he seems to sort of govern things, even you. The professor thinks he's your banker, but his intellectual domination leads me to the conclusion that he's your lawyer. There is a Miss Strong, evidently an important person. I venture the assertion that she's a literary woman, as you speak about asking her to 'look at her notes.' I shouldn't wonder if she's a rival of Miss Waldron's, eh, Professor?"

"Well," said Amidon impatiently, "who else?"

"Oh, lots of 'em," answered the judge. "Here's 'A' for instance, and under it a man named Alvord--a close friend of yours----"

"The one this telegram is from," said Amidon. "And I suppose this one in cipher is from Stevens, the lawyer or banker. It must be important."

"I shouldn't wonder," said Judge Blodgett; "and this Mr. Alvord I take to be a minister, for you connect him with some topic relating to 'Christian Martyrs' and 'rituals.' He must be a close friend, for you sometimes call him 'Jim,' in strict privacy, I presume. Oh, there's a regular directory of 'em here. I've even discovered that you have a little friend, a child of say seven or eight years--tell by the tone, you know--that you call 'Daisy' and 'Daise' and sometimes 'Strawberry.' These fondnesses for children and clergymen prove to me, Florian, that an Amidon is good goods on any confounded plane of consciousness you can throw 'em into--conservative, respectable, and all that, you know."

Amidon looked suspiciously at the notes, unappeased by this flattery. What justification there was for suspicion we shall be better able to say when we meet these Bellevale acquaintances of his.

"Is this the guide by which I am to regulate my conduct in Bellevale?" asked he, after looking it over.

"Well," said the judge, "it may not be quite like remembering all about things; but anyhow it will help some, won't it?"