Part 8

“And what did you say, Willie?” asked Mrs. Thayer.

“I said ‘Cheap? It was a shame to cheat the poor devil in that fashion.’ And she said, ‘Wasn’t it a bargain? He wanted a hundred, but I brought him down.’”

“You must have been keeping queer company in New York,” said Henrietta Gillett.

“Not at all. It was at Mrs. Baudeleigh’s house, and the woman--well, her husband’s one of the biggest lawyers in New York. But, then, that’s no worse than the astrology some of us here have gone daft over.”

“Oh--astrology--that’s a different matter,” objected Mrs. Thayer. “You evidently haven’t looked into it. That is a science--not at all the same as palmistry and spiritualism, and those frauds.”

Cecilia smiled--the amused, pitying smile of wisdom in the presence of ludicrous ignorance--and looked at Frothingham. He returned her look--pleased to have a secret, and such an intimate secret, in common with her. “But don’t you think you’re a bit rash, Mrs. Thayer?” he drawled. “You certainly believe in ghosts, now, don’t you?”

Miss Gillett’s handsome, high-bred face expressed astonishment. “Do _you_?” she asked, before Mrs. Thayer could answer him.

“We can’t doubt it over on our side. We’ve too much evidence of it. And--I was listening to an old chap from Cambridge--your Cambridge--very clever old fellow, _I_ thought--Yarrow, wasn’t it? Yes, Yarrow.”

“Yarrow!” Miss Gillett’s eyes flashed scorn. “He’s a disgrace to New England. We pride ourselves on having the culture of Emerson and the other great men of our past. What would they think of us if they could look in on us with our Yarrows and our Gonga Sahds and our Mrs. Ramsays. All the sensible people in the country must be laughing at us. Pardon me, Lord Frothingham--I’m very indignant at what I regard as superstitions and impostors. It’s only my view.”

“Not at all, not at all,” said Frothingham with an uneasy glance at Cecilia’s angry face. “I’m not one of those who wish all to believe alike. What the devil should we do if we hadn’t each other’s opinions to laugh at?”

“You’re such an ardent disciple,” continued Miss Gillett, “you ought to go to Yarrow’s Mrs. Ramsay. She’ll put you in communication with spirits, as many as you like, or rather as many as you care to pay for. I think she gets ten a ghost--twenty for letters.”

The discussion was raging hotly round the table, all but two of the men, and all but four of the women deriding astrology, palmistry, Buddhism, spiritualism; and the respective devotees of these cults deriding each the others. “Cut it out,” said Mrs. Ridgie finally. “We’ll have ‘rough house’ here the first thing you know.”

Everyone laughed. They liked slang, and Mrs. Ridgie’s was the boldest and quaintest. When the men and women were separated, “metaphysics” was again attempted by both. But the men who did not believe summarily laughed it down in the smoking room. “Those fads are all well enough for the women,” said Kennefick. “They’ve got to do something to pass the time, and they won’t do anything serious, or, if they do, they make a joke of it. But our men, Lord Frothingham”--he was addressing himself to the Earl, whose spiritualistic views he had not heard and did not suspect--“are too busy for such nonsense.”

“That’s a libel on the woman,” said Thayer--his fad was a militant socialism that had a kindly eye for a red flag. “It’s only women of the so-called fashionable class who go in for such silliness. The great mass of American women have something better to do.”

“That’s a libel on the women of the better class,” retorted Kennefick. “Precious few of them are so silly.”

“If it isn’t that it’s something else equally idle,” said Thayer. Except Frothingham he was the best dressed man in the room. “I’ve no time for idlers.”

“Why don’t you give your money away and shoulder a pick?” asked Kennefick teasingly.

“I’m not fit even to wield a pick”--Thayer was one of the ablest lawyers in Massachusetts--“and I’d give my money away if I could without doing more harm than good. There are two kinds of parasites--the plutocrats and the paupers. I’m ‘agin’ ’em both. And, as for spiritualism, I will admit that I don’t think we know enough about mind or the relations of mind and matter to dogmatise as you fellows have been doing.”

Kennefick winked at Frothingham as if saying: “Another proof that Thayer’s a crank.”

When Frothingham was beside Cecilia in the drawing room she said: “Would you like to go to Mrs. Ramsay?”

“Yes--will you take me?” he replied.

“I’ll write to-night making an appointment for Wednesday.”

He was liking her immensely now, and, while he believed--not nearly so vividly as at first--in her connections with the other world, he felt growing confidence that they would rapidly fade before reawakening interest in this world. Meanwhile, he reasoned, his cue was to ingratiate himself by sympathising with her and encouraging her to closer and closer confidence. “It’s only a step from best friend to lover,” he said to himself. And he made admirable use of the two days between her tentative acceptance of him and their visit to Mrs. Ramsay. He was justly proud of his manner toward her--a little of the brother, a great deal of the best friend, the tenderness and sympathy of the lover, yet nothing that could alarm her.

Mrs. Ramsay lived in an old brick cottage in a quiet street near Louisburg Square. In the two days Frothingham had become somewhat better acquainted with Henrietta Gillett and had got a strong respect for her intelligence. As he and Cecilia entered the dark little parlour he remembered what Henrietta had said about Mrs. Ramsay, and was on guard. The first impression he received was of a perfume, unmistakably of the heaviest, most suspicious Oriental kind. “Gad!” he said to himself, “that scent don’t suggest spirits. It smells tremendously of the world, the flesh, and the devil, especially the devil.”

As his eyes became accustomed to the faint light he discovered the radiating centre of this odour--a small blackish woman of forty or thereabouts, with keen shifty black eyes and a long face as hard and fleshless from the cheekbones down as from the cheekbones up. The mouth was wide and cold and cruel. She was dressed in a loose black woollen wrapper, tight at the wrists, and her scanty black hair was in a careless oily coil low on the back of her head. Her eyelids lifted languidly and she gave Cecilia her hand--a pretty hand, slender and sensitive.

“Good-morning, my dear,” she said. “This is the Earl of Frothingham, is it not?”

At this both Cecilia and Frothingham started--Cecilia because it was another and impressive evidence of Mrs. Ramsay’s power; Frothingham because he knew that voice so well. His knees weakened and he looked at Mrs. Ramsay again.

But she was not looking at him. She was saying to Cecilia: “Dr. Yarrow was here for two hours--he left not twenty minutes ago. I am _so_ exhausted!”

“Perhaps we would better come to-morrow,” said Cecilia, appeal, apology, and disappointment in her voice.

“No--no,” replied Mrs. Ramsay wearily. “Dr. Yarrow tells me he has never known me to be so thoroughly under control as to-day. And”--she smiled faintly at Cecilia--“you know I would do anything for _you_.”

“You _have_ done everything for me,” said Cecilia, and her tone of humble, even deferential, gratitude filled Frothingham with pity and disgust. He was staring stolidly at Mrs. Ramsay, but if the room had been lighter his changed colour and white lips might have been noted. Cecilia seated herself, and Frothingham gladly sat also, where he could see Mrs. Ramsay’s face without her seeing him unless she turned her head uncomfortably.

She rang a small silver bell on the table at her elbow. A girl answered. “The light, please,” said Mrs. Ramsay.

The girl went away and returned in a moment with a lamp whose strong flame was completely and curiously shielded by a metal sphere except at one point underneath. When it was set upon the table it threw a powerful light in a flood upon a part of the surface of the table about six inches in diameter. The girl went to the windows and drew the heavy curtains across them. It was now impossible to see anything in the room except that small disc of intense light. In it presently appeared the slender, sensitive right hand of Mrs. Ramsay--it seemed to end at the wrist in nothingness. It laid upon the brightness a pad of white scribbling paper and a thick pencil with the heavy lead slightly rounded at the end; then it vanished. There was a long silence--Frothingham was sure he could hear Cecilia’s faint breathing. His own breath hardly came at all and his heart was beating crazily. He stared at those inanimate objects in the circle of dazzling light until his brain whirled.

A long sigh, apparently from Mrs. Ramsay, as if she were sinking into a deathlike sleep; a quick catching of the breath from the direction of Cecilia. He heard her move her chair to the light and then in it appeared her hand--long and narrow, looking waxen white, its nails, beautifully rounded, the most delicate blush of pink. It took the pencil and moved across the paper. Frothingham bent forward--she had written large, and he could easily read:

Dearest!

Her hand disappeared, and again there was in that unearthly light, only the pad, the pencil, and the heart-call into the infinite--“Dearest!”

A long pause, then the weird, severed hand--Frothingham could not associate it with Mrs. Ramsay--crawled haltingly into the light, hovered over the pencil, took it, began to make its blunt point scrawl along the paper--a loose, shaky handwriting. With the hair on the back of his head trembling to rise, Frothingham read:

My wife--I am glad you have come, though you bring another with you to profane our holy secret.

In the darkness a sharp exclamation from Cecilia, then a sound like a sob. The hand ceased to write, dropped the pencil, vanished instantly. In the light appeared Cecilia’s hand, trembling, its veins standing up, blue and pulsing--Frothingham was amazed that a hand by itself could express so much; it was as perfect a mirror of her feelings as her face would have been. She wrote eagerly:

But, dearest, you told me only this morning that he might, should, see all.

Her hand lifted the sheet, now filled with writing, laid it beside the pad, then disappeared. Again there was a long silence, and again the mysterious hand crawled out of the darkness, loosely held the pencil, and wrote slowly, staggeringly, faintly:

No, I have not spoken to you, seen you, since he came into your life--It has been hard for me to push my way through to-day--There is a barrier between us--You have been deceived--Can it be that you--but no, I trust my wife--

The hand paused. “Oh! oh!” sobbed Cecilia. The hand was moving again:

My friends here tell me that you are going away across the sea with an English fortune-hunter--with him. You have been cruel enough to bring him here to our bridal chamber--Oh, Cecilia----

The end of the sheet had been reached, but the hand wrote on for a few seconds, making vague markings in space, then vanished, dropping the pencil with a noise that in the strained silence sounded like a crash and made both Cecilia and Frothingham leap in their chairs. After a moment Cecilia’s trembling, eager, pathetic hands lifted off the filled sheet and withdrew. But the hand did not return. After a long wait her right hand--it seemed bloodless now--appeared once more upon the paper and wrote:

I have been deceived. I love only you. I thought I was obeying you. Speak to me, dearest. You see into my heart. Speak to me. Do not leave me alone.

Her hand laid the sheet upon the other filled sheets and withdrew from that neutral ground of dazzling light between the two great mystery lands. Immediately the other hand darted into the light, caught the pencil, and scrawled in great, tottering letters:

Yes, yes--but I cannot until he has gone far from you--Then come again--Good-b----

The hand vanished and there was a moan from the darkness that enveloped the medium--a moan that ended in a suppressed shriek. Frothingham saw Cecilia’s hands hastily snatch the written sheets from under the light. Then he heard a voice in his ear--he hardly knew it as hers: “Come--come quickly!”

He rose, and with his hand touching her arm followed her. The door opened--the dim hallway seemed brightly lighted, so great was the contrast. The maid was seated there. She at once rose, entered the medium’s room, and closed the door behind her. Cecilia and Frothingham went into the quiet little street--the enormous sunshine, the white snow over everything, in the distance the rumble of the city. He gave a huge sigh of relief, and wiped the sweat from his face--his very hair was wet and his collar was wilted. He was sickly pale.

“She always wishes to be left that way,” said Cecilia, as if she did not know what she was saying.

They walked to the corner together. “I am not well,” she said. He ventured to look at her; she was wan and old, and her eyes were deep circled in blue-black and she was blue-black at the corners of her mouth, at the edges of her nostrils. “I must go home--they will telephone Mrs. Ridgie. Don’t say where I was taken ill. Forgive me--it was all my fault--yet not mine--good-bye----” She did not put out her hand to him, but stood off from him with fear and anguish in her eyes.

“The woman’s a fraud--a----” he began.

She turned upon him with a fury of which he would not have believed her capable. “Go! go!” she exclaimed, as if she were driving away a dog. “Already you may have lost me my love. Go!”

He shrank from her. She walked rapidly away, and he saw her hail a cab, enter it, saw the cab drive away. With his head down he went in the opposite direction. “I think I must be mad,” he muttered. He thrust his hands deep into the outside pockets of his ulster. He drew out his right hand--in it was her purse, which she had given him to carry because it did not fit comfortably into her muff. “No,” he said, “she _was_ with me.”

He put the purse in the pocket and strode back the way he had come. He turned into the quiet little street, went to Mrs. Ramsay’s door, lifted and dropped the knocker several times. The maid opened the door a few inches and showed a frowning face.

Frothingham widened the space by thrusting himself into it. “Tell Mrs. Ramsay that Lord Frothingham wishes to speak to her,” he said in a tone that made her servant his servant.

She went into the ghost-chamber and soon reappeared. “Mrs. Ramsay is too exhausted to see anyone to-day.”

“Bah!” exclaimed Frothingham, and stalked past the maid and into the ghost-chamber.

The curtains were back and the slats of the shutters were open. Mrs. Ramsay, in her great chair by the table, was using a bottle of salts. She did not look in Frothingham’s direction as he closed the door sharply behind him.

He went to her and scowled down at her. “What the devil did you do that for, Lillian?”

Mrs. Ramsay did not change expression and did not answer.

“No one ever treated you decenter than I did. _You_----”

“No names, please, Slobsy,” said Mrs. Ramsay, shaking her bottle and sniffing it again.

At “Slobsy” he shivered--he was not a lunatic on the subject of his dignity, but he did not fancy this nickname of his Oxford days, thus inopportunely flung at him. He felt that at one stroke she had cut the ground from under his feet.

“I was sorry to do it,” she continued. “But I couldn’t have you poaching on my preserves, could I now, Slobsy? It cut me to do it”--she looked at him with friendly sympathy--“but you could better afford to lose her than I could. You forgive me, don’t you? You always were sensible.”

“I’ll expose you,” he said--he was once more imperturbable, and was looking at her calmly through his eyeglass and was speaking in his faintly satirical drawl.

“Expose--what?” asked Mrs. Ramsay, sniffing at her salts.

He reflected. Suppose he denounced her, put himself in a position where he could, probably would, be forced to tell all he knew about her, roused her anger and her vindictiveness--whom would he expose? Clearly, no one but himself to Cecilia, or Cecilia to the public. He knew nothing about Mrs. Ramsay that would prove her a fraud--in fifteen years she might have become the properest person in the world, might have developed into a medium. He turned and left the room and the house. Halfway to the corner he paused; a faint, dreary smile drifted over his face.

“It’s really a new sensation--to settle a bill,” he said to himself. “An outlawed bill, too. What luck--just my rotten luck!”

XI

At Mrs. Ridgie’s they guessed that Frothingham had proposed to Cecilia and that she had been unnerved by the shock to her widowed heart. He stayed on until the following Monday, neither amused nor amusing, then returned to Mrs. Staunton’s for two days. He found her intensely curious as to the trouble between Cecilia and him--she brought up the subject again and again, and with expert ingenuity at prying tried to trap him into telling her; she all but asked him point-blank. But he looked vague or vacant, pretended not to understand what she wanted, expressed lively interest in Cecilia’s progress toward health, professed keen regret that he must leave before she would be well enough to receive him.

As he was about to go Mrs. Staunton became desperate. “Allerton is a stern man,” she said, with an air that forbade the idea that mere vulgar curiosity was moving her. “He has the notion that Cecilia was not polite to you--you know, she gives way to strange moods. And he is so irritated against her that he is treating her harshly.”

Frothingham looked astonished. “Really!” he said. “How extraordinary. I can’t conceive how he happened to wander off into that. Nothing could be farther from the truth.”

“I confess,” Mrs. Staunton went on, “I’m much disappointed. I’ve taken a fancy to you. I had rather hoped that you and Cecilia would like each other--you understand.”

Frothingham reflected. It was possible, yes, probable, that Cecilia’s father could drive her into marrying him, would do it if he should hint to Mrs. Staunton that he did fancy Cecilia and was “horribly cut up” because she didn’t fancy him. “What the devil do her feelings matter to me?” he demanded of himself. “A month after we were married she’d forget all this ghost nonsense and would be thanking me for pulling her out of it.”

“And,” Mrs. Staunton was saying, “I know her father would have liked it as well as I.”

But Frothingham didn’t follow his impulse and her unconscious leading. “What am I thinking of?” he said to himself in the sharp struggle that was going on behind his impassive exterior. “I’m not that sort of blackguard--at least, not yet.” Then he drawled his answer to Mrs. Staunton: “I’m tremendously flattered, but really, I fear the young lady and I would never hit it off. I’ve no great fancy for marrying--never had. I’ve always thought it a poor business--one of the sort of things that are good for the women and children, you know, but not for the men.”

Mrs. Staunton looked mild and humourous disapproval. “What is the world coming to? A man asked me the other day why all the nice women were married and all the nice men single. I hadn’t thought of it until he spoke. But I must say it’s true of my acquaintances.”

“I hope you’ll let Mr. Allerton know he’s wrong,” said Frothingham. “I hate it that the poor girl’s had the screws put on her on my account.”

“Certainly--I’ll tell him. But I’m sorry it’s not to be as we hoped.” She was studying him with a puzzled expression. She had heard from what she regarded as a thoroughly trustworthy source that he had come over especially to get him a rich wife. If that wasn’t his object, why was he wandering about here? Titled foreigners didn’t come to America except for the one thing of interest to them which America has--money. She could not understand his unbusiness-like conduct.

He couldn’t understand it himself. “I always was an ass,” he thought. “Here am I, sinking straight to the bottom--or, what’s worse, the bottomless. Yet I’m squeamish about the kind of line that pulls me ashore. Yes--I’m an ass. Even Lillian, well as I knew her at Oxford, took me in a bit with her trumpery tricks to make a living. She completely foozled me--that is----” Did she “foozle” him? He couldn’t banish the doubt. And there was the incident of the horse--Lillian had nothing to do with that, yet it fitted in with her professions as to the spirit world. But hadn’t she as good as owned up by apologising for breaking it off between him and Cecilia? Perhaps she hadn’t meant that; perhaps she had meant she was sorry to be the medium for such a letter. “There was a lot of truth in that letter. And there must be something in witches and ghosts and all that, or the whole world wouldn’t believe in ’em. But what ghastly luck that Lillian should turn up after fifteen years--no, seventeen, by Jove! Gad, how she has gone off since she was bar-maid at the Golden Cross and the prettiest girl that walked the High Street.”

He paused in New York a few hours, long enough to get a disagreeable mail from the other side--a dismal letter from old Bagley, a suspiciously cheerful note from Evelyn, a few lines from Surrey with a postscript about Gwen--“I’ve shipped her off to Mentone. She’s a bit seedy this winter, poor girl.” Frothingham quarrelled at Hutt, drank himself into a state of glassy-eyed gloom and took the three-o’clock express for Washington. As he sat in the smoking car a man dropped into the next chair with a “How d’ye do, Frothingham?” Frothingham’s features slowly collected into an expression of recognition, of restrained pleasure. “Glad to see you, Wallingford. Going to Washington?”

“Yes--I’m in Congress, you know.”

“No, I didn’t know.” And it struck him as uncommonly modest in Wallingford never to have spoken of so distinguished an honour.

“My father put me in last year.”

“Oh, you’ve a seat in your family.” Frothingham nodded understandingly. “That’s very nice. They’ve almost abolished that sort of luxury with us. Nowadays, to get into Parliament a fellow has to put up a good many thousand pounds. Even then he must take his chances of winning a lot of noisy brutes. They often shout for him and vote for the other fellow.”

Wallingford’s face had flushed when Frothingham said “a seat in your family,” and the flush had deepened as he went on. “You haven’t got it quite straight, Frothingham--about us, I mean. No one can have a Congressional seat in his family in America. My father has some influence with the party in New York City. He always puts up a lot of money for campaigns. And they give him the chance to name a Congressman--if he’s willing to pay for it. That’s between us, you understand. It’s a bad system. But it applies only to a few districts in New York and perhaps one or two other cities.”

“It sounds like our system,” said Frothingham. “A devilish good system, I call it. If it weren’t for that the lower classes would be chucking us all out and putting their own kind in.”

“Well, we think it bad. I feel something like a fellow who knows he wouldn’t have won the race if he hadn’t bribed the other fellow’s jockey.”

“That’s your queer American way of looking at things. You are always pretending that birth and rank and wealth aren’t entitled to consideration. But that’s all on the surface--all ‘bluff,’ as you say. They get just as much consideration here as among us.”

“You’re judging the whole country by the people in one small class--and not by any means all of them.”

“Human nature is human nature,” replied Frothingham, with a cynical gleam in his eyeglass.

“If you go out West----”