CHAPTER XVIII.

Orson Vane, scintillating theatrically by the sea, was in a fine rage when Nevins ceased to answer his telegrams. Telegrams struck Vane as the most dramatic of epistles; there was always a certain pictorial effect in tearing open the envelope, in imagining the hushed expectation of an audience. A letter--pooh! A letter might be anything from a bill to a billet. But a telegram! Those little slips of paper struck immediate terror, or joy, or despair, or confusion; they hit hard, and swiftly. Certainly he had been hitting Nevins hard enough of late. He had peppered him with telegrams about the furniture, about the pictures; he had forbidden one day what he had ordered the day before. It never occurred to him that Nevins might seek escape from these torments. Yet that was what Nevins had done. He had tippled himself into a condition where he signed sweetly for each telegram and put it in the hall-rack. They made a beautiful, yellow festoon on the mahogany background.

"Those," Nevins told himself, "is for a gentleman as is far too busy to notice little things like telegrams."

Nevins watched that yellow border growing daily with fresh delight.

He could keep on accepting telegrams just as long as the sideboard held its strength. Each new arrival from the Western Union drove him to more glee and more spirits--of the kind one can buy bottled.

At last Orson Vane felt some alarm creeping through his armor of dramatic pose. Could Nevins have come to any harm? It was very annoying, but he would have to go to town for a day or so. That seemed unavoidable. Just as he had made up his mind to it, he happened to slip on a bit of lemon-peel. At once he fell into a towering rage. He cursed the entire service on the _Beaurivage_ up hill and down dale. You could hear him all over the harbor. It was the voice of a profane Voltaire.

That night, at the Casino, his rage found vent in action. He sold the _Beaurivage_ as hastily as he had bought her.

He left for town, by morning, full of bitterness at the world's conspiracy to cheat him. He felt that for a careless deck-hand to leave lemon-peel on the deck of the Beaurivage was nothing less than part of the world-wide cabal against his peace of mind.

He reached his town-house in a towering passion, all the accumulated ill-temper of the last few days bubbling in him. He flung the housedoor wide, stamped through the halls. "Nevins!" he shouted, "Nevins!"

Nothing stirred in the house. He entered room after room. Passing into his dressing-room he almost tore the hanging from its rod. A gust of air struck him from the wide-open window. Before he proceeded another step this gust, that his opening of the curtain had produced, lifted the veil from the mirror facing him. The veil swung up gently, revealed the glass, and dropped again.

Then he realized the figure of Nevins on a couch. He walked up to him. The smell of spirits met him at once.

"Poor Nevins!" he muttered.

Then he fell to further realizations.

The whole history of his three experiments unfolded itself before him. What, after them all, had he gained? What, save the knowledge of the littleness of the motives controlling those lives? This actor, this man the world thought great, whose soul he had held in usurpation, up to a little while ago, what was he? A very batch of vanities, a mountain of egoisms. Had there been, in any of the thoughts, the moods he had experienced from out the mental repertoire of that player, anything indicative of nobility, of large benevolence, of sweet and light in the finest human sense? Nothing, nothing. The ambition to imitate the obvious points of human action and conduct, to the end that one be called a character-actor; the striving for an echoed fame rightly belonging to the supreme names of history; a yearning for the stimulus of immediate acclamation--these things were not worth gaining. To have experienced them was to have caught nothing beneficial.

Orson Vane began to consider himself with contempt. Upon himself must fall the odium of what the souls he had borrowed had induced in him. The littleness he had fathomed, the depths of character to which he had sunk, all left their petty brands on him. He had penetrated the barriers of other men's minds, but what had it profited him? As a ship becalmed in foul waters takes on barnacles, so had he brought forth, from the realm of alien springs and motives he had made his own, a dreadful incrustation of painful conjectures on the supremacy of evil in the world.

It needed only a glance at the man, Nevins, to force home the destructiveness born of these incursions into other lives. That trembling, cowering thing had been, before Orson Vane's departure from the limitations of his own temperament, a decent, self-respecting fellow. While now--

Vane paced about the house in bitter unrest. In the outer hall he noticed the yellow envelopes bordering the coat-rack. He took one of them down, opened it, and smiled. "Poor Nevins!" he murmured. The next moment a lad from the Telegraph office appeared in the doorway. Vane went forward himself; there was no use disturbing Nevins.

The wire had followed him on from the _Beaurivage_, or rather from the man to whom he had sold her. It was from Augustus Vanlief. Its brevity was like a blow in the face.

"Am ill," it said, "must see you."

It was still possible, that very hour, to get an express to the Professor's mountain retreat. There was nothing to prevent immediate departure. Nothing--except Nevins. The man really must exercise more care about that mirror. He was safely out of all his experiments now, but the thing was dangerous none the less; if it had been his own property, he would have known how to deal with it. But it was the Professor's secret, the discovery of a lifetime. For elaborate precautions, or even for hiding the thing in some closet, there was no time. He could only rouse Nevins as energetically as possible to a sense of his previous defection from duty; gently and quite kindly he admonished him to take every care of the new mirror in the time coming. Nevins listened to him wide-eyed; his senses were still too much agog for him to realize whence this change of voice and manner had come to his master. It was merely another page in the chapter of bewilderment that piled upon him. He bowed his promise to be careful, he assented to a number of things he could not fathom, and when Vane was gone he cleared the momentary trouble in his mind by an ardent drink. The liquor brought him a most humorous notion, and one that he felt sure would relieve him of all further anxieties on the score of the new mirror. He approached the back of it, tore the curtain from its face, wheeled it to the centre of the room, and placed all the other cheval-glasses close by. Throughout this he had wit enough, or fear enough--for his memory brought him just enough picture of Orson's own handling of this mirror to inspire a certain awe of the front of the thing--never to pass in face of the mirror. When he had the mirrors grouped in close ranks, he spun about on his heels quickly, as if seized with the devout frenzy of a dervish. He fell, finally, in a daze of dizziness and liquor. Yet he had cunning enough left. He crept out of the room on his stomach, like a snake with fiery breath. He knew that the angle at which the mirrors were tilted would keep him, belly to the carpet, out of range. Then he reeled, shouting, into the corridors.

He had accomplished his desire. He no longer knew one mirror from the other.

Orson Vane, in the meanwhile, was being rushed to the mountains. It was with a new shock of shame that he saw the ravages illness was making on the fine face of Vanlief. This, too, was one of the items in the profit-and-loss column of his experiments. Yet this burden was, perhaps, a shared one.

"Ah," said Vanlief, with a quick breath of gladness, "thank God!" He knew, the instant Vane spoke, that it was Orson Vane himself who had come; he knew that there was no more doubt as to the success of his own recent headlong journeyings. They had prostrated him; but--they had won. Yet there was no knowing how far this illness might go; it was still imperative to come to final, frank conclusions with the partner in his secret.

The instant that Vane had been announced Jeannette Vanlief had left her father's side. She withdrew to the adjoining room, where only a curtain concealed her; the doors had all been taken down for the summer. She did not wish to meet Orson Vane. Over her real feelings for him had come a cloud of doubts and distastes. She had never admitted to herself, openly, that she loved him; she tried to persuade herself that his notorious vagaries had put him beyond her pale. She was determined, now, to be an unseen ear to what might pass between Orson and her father. It was not a nice thing to do, but, for all she knew, her father's very life was at stake. What dire influence might Vane not have over her father? She suspected there was some bond between them; in her father's weakened state it seemed her duty to watch over him with every devotion and alertness.

Yet, for a long time, the purport of the conversation quite eluded her.

"I have not gone the gamut of humanity," said Orson, "but I have almost, it seems to me, gone the gamut of my own courage."

Vanlief nodded. He, too, understood. Consequences! Consequences! How the consequences of this world do spoil the castles one builds in it! Castles in the air may be as pretty as you please, but they are sure to obstruct some other mortal's view of the sky.

"If I were younger," sighed Vanlief, "if I were only younger."

They did not yet, either of them, dare to be open, brutal, forthright.

"I could declare, I suppose," Vanlief went on, "that it was somewhat your own fault. You chose your victims badly. You have, I presume, been disenchanted. You found little that was beautiful, many things that were despicable. The spectacles you borrowed have all turned out smoky. Yet, consider--there are sure to be just as many rosy spectacles as dark ones in the world."

"No doubt," assented Vane, though without enthusiasm, "but there are still--the consequences. There is still the chance that I could never repay the soul I take on loan; still the horror of being left to face the rest of my days with a cuckoo in my brain. Mind, I have no reproaches, none at all. You overstated nothing. I have felt, have thought, have done as other men have felt and thought and done; their very inner secret souls have been completely in my keeping. The experiment has been a triumph. Yet it leaves me joyless."

"It has made me old," said Vanlief, simply. "Ah," he repeated, "if only I were younger!"

"The strain," he began again, "of putting an end to your last experiment has told on me. I overdid it. Such emotion, and such physical tension, is more than I should have attempted. I begin to fear I may not last very long. And in that case I think I shall have to take my secret with me. Orson, it comes to this; I am too old to perfect this marvelous thing to the point where it will be safe for humanity at large. It is still unsafe,--you will agree to that. You might wreck your own life and that of others. The chances are one in a thousand of your ever finding a human being whom God has so graciously endowed with the divine spirit as to be able to lose part of it without collapse. I have hoped and hoped, that such a thing would happen; then there would be two perfectly even, exactly tempered creatures; even if, upon that transfusion, the mirror disappeared, there would be no unhappiness as a reproach. But we have found nothing like that. You have embittered yourself; the glimpses of other souls you have had have almost stripped you of your belief in an eternal Good."

"You mean to send for the mirror?"

"It would be better, wiser. If I live, it will still be here. If I die, it must be destroyed. In any event--"

At the actual approach of this conclusion to his experiments Orson Vane felt a sense of coming loss. With all the dangers, all the loom of possible disaster, he was not yet rid of the awful fascination of this soul-snatching he had been engaged in.

"Perhaps," he argued, "my next experiment might find the one in a thousand you spoke of."

"I think you had better not try again. Tell me, what was Wantage's soul like?"

"Oh, I cannot put it into words. A little, feverish, fretful soul, shouting, all the time: I, I, I! Plotting, planning for public attention, worldly prominence. No thoughts save those of self. An active brain, all bent on the ego. A brain that deliberately chose the theatre because it seems the most spectacular avenue to eminence. A magnetism that keeps outsiders wondering whether childishness or genius lurks behind the mask. The bacillus of restlessness is in that brain; it is never idle, always planning a new pose for the body and the voice."

"Well," urged Vanlief, "think what might have been had I not put a stop to the thing. You don't realize the terrible anxiety I was in. You might have ruined the man's career. However petty we, you and I, may hold him, there are things the world expects of him; we came close to spoiling all that. I had to act, and quickly. You may fancy the difficulties of getting the mirror to Wantage. Oh, it is still all like an evil dream." He lay silent a while, then resumed: "Is the mirror in the old room?"

"Yes. With the others, in the dressing-room."

"Nevins looks out for it?"

"As always. Though he grows old, too."

Vanlief looked sharply at Orson, he suspected something behind that phrase about Nevins. Again he urged:

"Better have Nevins bring the mirror back to me."

Vane hesitated. He murmured a reply that Jeannette no longer cared to hear. The whole secret was open to her, now; she saw that the Orson Vane she loved--she exulted now in her admission of that--was still the man she thought him, that all his inexplicable divagations had been part of this awful juggling with the soul that her father had found the trick of. She realized, too, by the manner of Vane, that he had not yet given up all thought of these experiments; he wanted one more. One more; one more; it was the cry of the drunkard, the opium-eater, the victim of every form of mania.

It should never be, that one more trial. What her father had done, she could do. She glided out of the room, on the heels of her quick resolution.

The two men, in their arguments, their widening discussions, did not bring her to mind for hours. By that that time she was well on her way to town.

Her purpose was clear to her; nothing should hinder its achievement. She must destroy the mirror. There were sciences that were better killed at the outset. She did not enter deeply into those phases of the question, but she had the clear determination to prevent further mischief, further follies on the part of Vane, further chances of her father's collapse.

The mirror must be destroyed. That was plain and simple.

It took a tremendous ringing and knocking to bring Nevins to the door of Vane's house.

"I am Miss Vanlief," she said, "I want to see my father's mirror."

"Certainly, miss, certainly." He tottered before her, chuckling and chattering to himself. He was in the condition now when nothing surprised him; any rascal could have led him with a word or a hint; he was immeasurably gay at everything in the world. He reeled to the dressing-room with an elaborate air of courtesy.

"At your service, miss, there you are, miss. You walk straight on, and there you are, miss. There's the mirror, miss, plain as pudding."

She strode past him, drawing her skirt away from the horrible taint of his breath. She knew she would find the mirror at once, curtained and solitary sentinel before the doorway. She would simply break it with her parasol, stab it, viciously, from behind.

But, once past the portal, she gave a little cry.

All the mirrors were jumbled together, all looked alike, and all faced her, mysterious, glaringly.

"Nevins," she called out, "which--which is the one?"

"Ah, miss," he said, leeringly, "don't I wish I knew."

No sense of possible danger to herself, only a despair at failure, came upon Jeannette. Failure! Failure! She had meant to avert disaster, and she had accomplished--nothing, nothing at all.

She left the house almost in tears. She felt sure Vane would yield again to the temptation of these frightful experiments. She could do nothing, nothing. She had felt justified in attempting destruction of what was her father's; but she could not wantonly offer all that array of mirrors on the altar of her purpose. She stumbled along the street, suffering, full of tears. It was with a sigh of relief that she saw a hansom and hailed it. The cab had hardly turned a corner before Orson Vane, coming from another direction, let himself into his house. His conference with Vanlief had ceased at his own promise to make just one more trial of the mirror. He could not go about the business of the life he led in town without assuring himself the mirror was safe.

He found Nevins incoherent and useless. He began to consider seriously the advisability of discharging the man; still, he hated to do that to an old servant, and the man might come to his senses and his duties.

He spent some little time re-arranging the mirrors in his room. He was sure there had been no intrusion since he was there himself, and he knew Nevins well enough to know that individual's horror of facing the mirror. He himself faced the new mirror boldly enough, sure that his own image was the only one resting there. He knew the mirror easily, in spite of the robbery that the wind, as he thought, had committed.

Nevins, hiding in the corridor, watched him, in drunken amusement.