Part 17

“After all, she is only a disembodied astral entity with whom I became acquainted—through my fifth principle, which is usually well developed—in the days when I moved in Spiritualistic society. She was, when living—for she died long before I was born—a young lady of very good family. I believe her father was a clergyman ... and I will not deny that I encouraged her visits.”

“Discourage them from this day!” I said firmly. “Neither think of her nor dream of her again, or I will have a separation.”

“I will keep her, as much as possible, out of my waking thoughts,” said poor Vavasour, trying to soothe me; “but a man cannot control his dreams, and she pervades mine in a manner which, even before our engagement, my pet, I began to find annoying. However, if she really is, as she has told me, a lady by birth and breeding, she will understand”—he raised his voice as though she were there and he intended her to hear—“that I am now a married man, and from this moment desire to have no further communication with her. Any suitable provision it is in my power to make——”

He ceased, probably feeling the difficulty he would have in explaining the matter to his lawyers; and it seemed to me that a faint mocking sniggle, or rather the auricular impression of it, echoed his words. Then, after some more desultory conversation, we fell soundly asleep. An hour may have passed when the same chilly sensation as of a damp draft blowing across the bed roused me. I rubbed my cheek and opened my eyes. They met the pale, impertinent smile of the hateful Katie, who was installed in her old post beside Vavasour’s end of the bolster.

“You see,” she said, in the same soundless way, and with a knowing little nod of triumph, “it is no use. He is dreaming of me again!”

“Wake up!” I screamed, snatching the pillow from under my husband’s head and madly hurling it at the shameless intruder. This time Vavasour was almost snappish at being disturbed. Daylight surprised us in the middle of our first connubial quarrel. The following night brought a repetition of the whole thing, and so on, _da capo_, until it became plain to us, to our mutual disgust, that the more Vavasour strove to banish Katie from his dreams, the more persistently she cropped up in them. She was the most ill-bred and obstinate of astrals—Vavasour and I the most miserable of newly-married people. A dozen times in a night I would be roused by that cold draft upon my cheek, would open my eyes and see that pale, phosphorescent, outline perched by Vavasour’s pillow—nine times out of the dozen would be driven to frenzy by the possessive air and cynical smile of the spook. And although Vavasour’s former regard for her was now converted into hatred, he found the thought of her continually invading his waking mind at the most unwelcome seasons. She had begun to appear to both of us _by day as well as by night_ when our poisoned honeymoon came to an end, and we returned to town to occupy the house which Vavasour had taken and furnished in Sloane Street. I need only mention that Katie accompanied us.

Insufficient sleep and mental worry had by this time thoroughly soured my temper no less than Vavasour’s. When I charged him with secretly encouraging the presence I had learned to hate, he rudely told me to think as I liked! He implored my pardon for this brutality afterwards upon his knees, and with the passage of time I learned to endure the presence of his attendant shade with patience. When she nocturnally hovered by the side of my sleeping spouse, or in constituence no less filmy than a whiff of cigarette-smoke, appeared at his elbow in the face of day, I saw her plainly, and at these moments she would favor me with a significant contraction of the eyelid, which was, to say the least of it, unbecoming in a spirit who had been a clergyman’s daughter. After one of these experiences it was that the idea which I afterwards carried into execution occurred to me.

I began by taking in a few numbers of a psychological publication entitled _The Spirit-Lamp_. Then I formed the acquaintance of Madame Blavant, the renowned Professoress of Spiritualism and Theosophy. Everybody has heard of Madame, many people have read her works, some have heard her lecture. I had heard her lecture. She was a lady with a strong determined voice and strong determined features. She wore her plentiful gray hair piled in sibylline coils on the top of her head, and—when she lectured—appeared in a white Oriental silk robe that fell around her tall gaunt figure in imposing folds. This robe was replaced by one of black satin when she held her _séances_. At other times, in the seclusion of her study, she was draped in an ample gown of Indian chintz innocent of cut, but yet imposing. She smiled upon my new-born desire for psychic instruction, and when I had subscribed for a course of ten private _séances_ at so many guineas a piece she smiled more.

Madame lived in a furtive, retiring house, situated behind high walls in Endor’s Grove, N.W. A long glass tunnel led from the garden gate to the street door, for the convenience of Mahatmas and other persons who preferred privacy. I was one of those persons, for not for spirit worlds would I have had Vavasour know of my repeated visits to Endor’s Grove. Before these were over I had grown quite indifferent to supernatural manifestations, banjos and accordions that were thrummed by invisible performers, blood-red writing on mediums’ wrists, mysterious characters in slate-pencil, Planchette, and the Table Alphabet. And I had made and improved upon acquaintance with Simon.

Simon was a spirit who found me attractive. He tried in his way to make himself agreeable, and, with my secret motive in view—let me admit without a blush—I encouraged him. When I knew I had him thoroughly in hand, I attended no more _séances_ at Endor’s Grove. My purpose was accomplished upon a certain night, when, feeling my shoulder violently shaken, I opened the eyes which had been closed in simulated slumber to meet the indignant glare of my husband. I glanced over his shoulder. Katie did not occupy her usual place. I turned my glance towards the armchair which stood at my side of the bed. It was not vacant. As I guessed, it was occupied by Simon. There he sat, the luminously transparent appearance of a weak-chinned, mild-looking young clergyman, dressed in the obsolete costume of eighty years previously. He gave me a bow in which respect mingled with some degree of complacency, and glanced at Vavasour.

“I have been explaining matters to your husband,” he said, in that soundless spirit-voice with which Katie had first made me acquainted. “He understands that I am a clergyman and a reputable spirit, drawn into your life-orbit by the irresistible attraction which your mediumistic organization exercises over my——”

“There, you hear what he says!” I interrupted, nodding confirmatively at Vavasour. “Do let me go to sleep!”

“What, with that intrusive beast sitting beside you?” shouted Vavasour indignantly. “Never!”

“Think how many months I have put up with the presence of Katie!” said I. “After all, it’s only tit for tat!” And the ghost of a twinkle in Simon’s pale eye seemed to convey that he enjoyed the retort.

Vavasour grunted sulkily, and resumed his recumbent position. But several times that night he awakened me with renewed objurgations of Simon, who with unflinching resolution maintained his post. Later on I started from sleep to find Katie’s usual seat occupied. She looked less pert and confident than usual, I thought, and rather humbled and fagged, as though she had had some trouble in squeezing her way into Vavasour’s sleeping thoughts. By day, after that night, she seldom appeared. My husband’s brain was too much occupied with Simon, who assiduously haunted me. And it was now my turn to twit Vavasour with unreasonable jealousy. Yet though I gloried in the success of my stratagem, the continual presence of that couple of spooks was an unremitting strain upon my nerves.

But at length an extraordinary conviction dawned on my mind, and became stronger with each successive night. Between Simon and Katie an acquaintance had sprung up. I would awaken, or Vavasour would arouse, to find them gazing across the barrier of the bolster which divided them with their pale negatives of eyes, and chatting in still, spirit voices. Once I started from sleep to find myself enveloped in a kind of mosquito-tent of chilly, filmy vapor, and the conviction rushed upon me that He and She had leaned across our couch and exchanged an intangible embrace. Katie was the leading spirit in this, I feel convinced—there was no effrontery about Simon. Upon the next night I, waking, overheard a fragment of conversation between them which plainly revealed how matters stood.

“We should never have met upon the same plane,” remarked Simon silently, “but for the mediumistic intervention of these people. Of the man”—he glanced slightingly towards Vavasour—“I cannot truthfully say I think much. The lady”—he bowed in my direction—“is everything that a lady should be!”

“You are infatuated with her, it is plain!” snapped Katie, “and the sooner you are removed from her sphere of influence the better.”

“Her power with me is weakening,” said Simon, “as Vavasour’s is with you. Our outlines are no longer so clear as they used to be, which proves that our astral individualities are less strongly impressed upon the brains of our earthly sponsors than they were. We are still materialized; but how long this will continue——” He sighed and shrugged his shoulders.

“Don’t let us wait for a formal dismissal, then,” said Katie boldly. “Let us throw up our respective situations.”

“I remember enough of the Marriage Service to make our union, if not regular, at least respectable,” said Simon.

“And I know quite a fashionable place on the Outside Edge of Things, where we could settle down,” said Katie, “and live practically on nothing.”

I blinked at that moment. When I saw the room again clearly, the chairs beside our respective pillows were empty.

Years have passed, and neither Vavasour nor myself has ever had a glimpse of the spirits whom we were the means of introducing to one another. We are quite content to know ourselves deprived for ever of their company. Yet sometimes, when I look at our three babies, I wonder whether that establishment of Simon’s and Katie’s on the Outside Edge of Things includes a nursery.

THE WIDOW’S MITE

People bestowed that nickname upon little Lord Garlingham years ago, when he was the daintiest of human playthings ever adored by a young mother. Shutting my eyes, I can recall him, all golden curls and frills, sitting on the front seat of the victoria with Toto, the Maltese. Japanese pugs had not then come into fashion, nor the ubiquitous automobile. Gar is the Widow’s Mite still, but for other reasons. He was a charming, irresolute, impulsive child, who invariably meant “macaroons” when he said “sponge cake.” It recurs to me that he was passionately fond of dolls, not nigger Sambo dolls, or sailor dolls, or Punchinelli with curved caps and bells, or policemen with large feet so cunningly weighted that it is next door to impossible to knock them over, but frilled and furbelowed dollies of the gentler sex. There was a blue princess in tulle with a glass chandelier-drop tiara, and a dancing girl in pink, and a stout, shapeless, rag lady, whose features were painted on the calico ball that represented her head, and whose hair resembled the fringe of a black woollen shawl. Holding her by one leg, Gar would sink to sleep upon his lace-trimmed pillows in a halo of shining curls, and Lady Garlingham’s last new friend or latest new adorer would be brought up to the night nursery for an after-dinner peep at “my precious in his cot.”

“My precious” was equally charming in his Eton days, when his sleepy green eyes looked up at you from under a lock of fair silky hair that was never to be kept within regulation School bounds, but continually strayed upon the fair, if freckled, expanse of a brow which might have been the home of a pure and innocent mind, and probably was not. He had a pleasant treble boy’s voice and a beautiful smile, particularly when his mother told him he might smoke just one cigarette, of her own special brand, as a great treat.

“Mother’s are hay,” he said afterwards in confidence, and added that he preferred cut Cavendish, and that the best way to induce a meerschaum to color was to smoke it foul, and never to remove the dottle. But Lady Garlingham was never the wiser. She had the utmost faith in her boy.

“Gar will be a dab at Classics,” she said with pride. “Fancy his knowing that Dido was a heathen goddess, and Procrustes was a Grecian King who murdered his mother and afterwards put out his own eyes! I must really give his tutor a hint not to bring him on _too_ fast. He will have to make his own way in the world, poor dear, that is certain; but I don’t want him to turn out a literary genius with eccentric clothes, or anything in the scientific line that isn’t careful about its nails and doesn’t comb its hair.”

Garlingham’s clothes are always of the latest fashion and in the most admirable taste. His hair is as well groomed, his hands are as immaculate as any mother’s heart could desire, and he has not turned out a genius. During his career at Oxford he did not allow his love of study to interfere with the more serious pursuit of athletic distinction. He left the University unburdened with honors, carrying in his wake a string of bills as long as a kite’s tail. Relieved of this by the sacrifice of some of Lady Garlingham’s diamonds, the kite shot up into the empyrean in the wake of a dazzling star of the comic-opera stage.

“But, thank Heaven, the boy has principles,” breathed Lady Garlingham. “He never dreamed of marrying her!”

Garlingham descended from the skies ere long, tangled in a telegraphic wire, and went into the Diplomatic Service. He became fourth under-secretary at an Imperial foreign Embassy, in virtue of the marriage of his maternal aunt with Prince John Schulenstorff-Wangelbrode (who was Military Attaché in the days of the pannier and the polonaise, the bustle and the fringed whip-parasol). I have not the least idea in what Garlingham’s duties consisted, and the dear fellow was diplomatically reticent when sounded on the subject; but of one thing I am sure, that few young men have worn an official button and lapels with greater ease and distinction. He quite adored his mother, and made her his _confidante_ in all his love affairs. Indeed I believe Lady Garlingham kept a little register of these at one time on the sticks of an ivory fan—those that were going off, those that were in full bloom, and those that were just coming on; and posted up dates and set down names with the utmost regularity.

For, like the typical butterfly, Garlingham sipped every flower and changed every hour. A very mature Polly has now his passion requited, and if human happiness depended on avoirdupois, and it were an established mathematical fact that the felicity of the object attracted may be calculated by the dimensions of the object attracting, then is the handsome boy I used to tip a happy man indeed.

For Gar, “that pocket edition of Apollo,” as a Royal personage with a happy knack at nicknames termed him—Gar has married a middle-aged, not too good-looking, extremely fat widow, unknown to fame as Mrs. Rollo Polkingham. The couple were Hanover Squared in June. Leila and Sheila Polkingham made the loveliest pair of Dresden china bridesmaids imaginable, and a Bishop tied the knot, assisted by the brother of the bride, the Reverend Michael O’Halloran, of Mount Slattery, County Quare, a surpliced brogue with a Trinity College B.A. hood. The hymns that were sung by the choir during the ceremony were, “The Voice that Breathed,” and “Fight the Good Fight,” and the bride looked quite as bridal as might have been expected of a thirty-eight inch girth arrayed in the latest heliotrope shade. She became peony, Garlingham pale blue, when the moment arrived for him to pronounce his vows, and a voice—a high, nasal voice of the penetrating, saw-edged American kind—said, several pews behind, quite audibly: “Well, I call it child-stealing!”

The owner of that voice was at the reception in Chesterfield Crescent. So was I, and when Garlingham thanked me for a silver cigar-box I had sent him in memory of our old friendship, his hand was damp and clammy, though he smiled. The Dowager Lady Garlingham, looking much younger than her daughter-in-law, floated across to ask me why I never came to see her now, and Gar drifted away. Later, I had a fleeting glimpse of the bridegroom standing in the large, cool shadow of his newly-made bride, looking helplessly from one to the other of his recently-acquired stepdaughters. Then my circular gaze met and merged in the still attractive eyes of Lady Garlingham.

“You heard,” she breathed in her old confidential way, “what that very outspoken person—I think a Miss Van Something, from Philadelphia—said in church?”

“I did hear,” I returned, “and, while I deplored her candor, I could not but admit——”

“That she had hit off the situation with dreadful accuracy—I felt that, too,” sighed Gar’s mother.

“We are old friends, or were,” said I, for people always became sentimental in the vicinity of Lady Garlingham. “Tell me how it happened!”

“Oh, how——” Lady Garlingham adroitly turned a slight groan into a little cough. “Indeed, I hardly know. All that seems burned into me is that I have become a dowager without adequate cause.”

Her pretty brown eyebrows crumpled; she dabbed her still charming eyes with an absurd little lace handkerchief. She wore a wonderful dress of something filmy in Watteau blue, and a Lamballe hat with a _paradis_. Through innumerable veils of tulle her complexion was really wonderful, considering, and her superb hair still tawny gold.

“Don’t look at me and ask yourself why I’ve never married again,” she commanded, in the old petulant way. “For Gar’s sake, is the stereotyped answer to that. And when I look at _her_——” She dabbed away a tear with the absurd little handkerchief. “She hasn’t had the indecency to call me ‘Mother’ _yet_.... But she will, I know she will! If she doesn’t, she is more than human. I have said such things to _her_.”

“I can quite believe it,” I agreed.

Champagne cups were going about; infinitesimal sandwiches, tabloids of condensed indigestion, were being washed down. The best man, an Attaché friend of Garlingham’s, brandishing a silver-handled carving-knife, was encouraging the bridling bride to attack the cake. Sheila and Leila hovered near with silver baskets, and Garlingham, with the merest shadow of his old easy _insouciance_, was replying to the statute and legendary chaff of the other men.

“You know he was engaged to the second girl, Sheila, first?” went on Lady Garlingham plaintively.

I had not known it, and it gave me a thrill.

“Indeed!” I said in a tone of polite inquiry.

“When he was a very little boy, and I took him into a shop to buy a toy,” said poor Lady Garlingham, “he always was in raptures with it, whatever it was, until we were half-way home, and _then_ nothing would satisfy him but the carriage being turned round and driven back, so that he might exchange the thing for something he had particularly disliked at first.”

I recalled the trait in my own experience of my young friend.

“Ah, yes. He always took _pralines_ when he really wanted chocolate fondants,” sighed his mother. “And then—but perhaps you have forgotten—the dolls?”

I had forgotten the dolls. I suppose I gaped rather stupidly.

“He had three,” gulped Lady Garlingham. “He chose the blue one first, and then, when we had just reached Hyde Park Gate, he cried, and said it was the pink one he had wanted all along. So we went back and got her, and drove home to lunch, which, of course, was Gar’s dinner. And then, if you had seen him, poor darling,”—her maternal bosom heaved with a repressed sob—“with his underlip turned down in a quite South Sea Island way, and the tears tumbling into his rice pudding because the blue creature was absolutely his ideal from the first, you would have been foolish enough to order the carriage and drive him back to the Regent Street toyshop.”

“As you did?”

“As I did,” admitted Lady Garlingham.

“With the result that might have been expected?”

“With the result that seems to me _now_ to be a hateful foreshadowing of what was to be my poor darling’s fate in life,” said the poor darling’s mother.... “No, thank you, Sheila dear, I positively could not touch it,” she added, as the cake-basket came our way. “Not even to dream on—I have quite done with dreaming now.”

“But how,” I asked hypercritically, “could Garlingham’s subsequent choice of the blue doll, originally discarded in favor of the pink, foreshadow his ultimate fate in life?”

“Oh, don’t you understand?” quavered poor Lady Garlingham. “He went into the toyshop by himself, and came marching out with what the Americans call a rag-baby, the most odious, distorted, shapeless horror you can imagine. It fascinated him by its sheer ugliness. He was obsessed, magnetized, compelled.... As in this case!” A burst of confidence broke down the floodgates of the poor woman’s reserve. She grasped me by the arm as she gurgled out hysterically—rocking her slight form to and fro: “My dear, _she_ is the rag-doll, this awful widow creature Garlingham has married. And to his fatal curse of indecision he owes the Incubus that is crushing him to-day.”

The bride had tripped upstairs to put on her going-away gown, attended by Leila and Sheila and some freshly-married women, who meant to struggle for the slippers for second choice.

Loud, explosive bursts of jeering merriment came from the dining-room, where most of the men of the party had congregated. An exhausted maid and a very obvious private detective hovered in the neighborhood of the display of wedding presents, and through the open door of the drawing-room one caught a glimpse of suspiciously new luggage piled up in the hall, and a little group of youths and maidens of the callower kind, who were industriously packing the sunshades and umbrellas in the holdalls with rice and confetti.

“My poor, poor boy has been in and out of love _hundreds_ of times,” moaned the despairing Dowager, “without once having been actually engaged. So that when I saw Gar with these three women sitting on four green chairs in the Park in May, I was not seriously alarmed. Georgiana Bayham told me that the stout woman with too many bangles was a Mrs. Rollo Polkingham, a widow, of whom nobody who might with truth be styled anybody had ever heard, and that she had a wild, jungly house in Chesterfield Crescent—(don’t those climbing peacocks in the wall-paper set your teeth on edge?)—and always asked young men to call—and wanted to know their intentions at the third visit.... ‘I would give this turquoise charm off my _porte-bonheur_,’ said Georgiana, in her loud, bubbling voice, ‘to know which of the two daughters Gar is smitten with. The girl with the eyes like black ballot-balls, or the other with the Gaiety smile.’ ... My dear, it was the dark one, Leila, as it happened. Not that Gar flirted desperately. But they went to Hurlingham and lunched at Prince’s, and then the mother thought my boy hooked, and struck——”

“Asked his intentions?” I hinted.