Part 11

"They are not especially well chosen. I fear you'll find them a mixed lot. I read nothing but law in the city--here I indulge my fancy. You'll wonder what my principle of selection is, and, if you ask me, I must answer--I haven't any. I buy whatever commends itself to me at the moment. One thing leads to another--romance to history, history to poetry, poetry to the drama, and so on." He greeted a very tidy maid who entered the room. "Good-evening, Marie. This is Mrs. Ollnee, and this is her son, Mr. Victor Ollnee. Please see that they are made comfortable." Then again to his guests. "You must be tired."

"I am so, Mr. Bartol," replied Mrs. Ollnee, "and if you'll pardon me I'll go to my room."

"Certainly--and you may go, too, if you feel like it," he said to Victor.

"I am not sleepy," replied Victor.

"Very well," replied his host. "Be seated and we'll discuss the situation for a few minutes."

He led the way to a corner where two wide windows opening on the lawn made delicious mingling of night air and study light, and offering his guest a cigar, took a seat, saying: "I run out here whenever the city becomes a burden. I find I need just such a corrective to the intense life of the city. It is my rule to give no thought to legal troubles while I am here; hence the absence of codes and all legal literature. You are a college man, Mrs. Joyce tells me."

"I was at Winona last Saturday, and expected to stay there till June, when I was due to graduate. Then the devil broke loose, and here I am. When will my mother's case come up?"

"Not for some weeks, I fear. If you wish to return to your studies we can arrange that."

"No. I'm done with school. I'm only worried about my mother. What do you think of her case, Mr. Bartol?"

"I'm not informed sufficiently to say," he replied, slowly. "The whole subject of hypnotic control seems to be involved. I must know more of your mother before I can even hazard an opinion. The theories of suggestion are all rather vague to me. I have only what might be called a newspaper knowledge of them; but I have some information as to your mother's profession I gained from my friend Mrs. Joyce, so that I am not entirely uninformed. Besides, it is a lawyer's business to know everything, and I shall at once proceed to bore into the subject."

Mrs. Ollnee returning brought him to his feet in graceful acknowledgment of her sex, and placing a chair for her, he said, "I hope you don't mind tobacco."

"Not at all," she replied, quite as graciously.

He placed a chair for her so that the light fell upon her face, and she knew that he intended to study her as if she were a page of strange text.

"I'm glad you like it here," he said, in answer to her repeated admiration of his home, "for I suspect you'll have to stay here for the present. The city is passing through one of those moral paroxysms which come once in a year or two. Last year it was the social evil; just now it concerns itself with what the reformers are pleased to call 'the occult fakers.' The feeling of a jury would be against you at present, and as I have promised Mrs. Joyce to take charge of your defense, I think it well for you to go into retirement here while I take time to inform myself of the case."

"I do not like to trouble you."

"It is no trouble, my dear madam. Here is this big home, empty and completely manned. A couple of guests, especially a hearty young man, will be a godsend to my cook. She complains of not having men to feed. Don't let any question of expense to me trouble you."

"Thank you most deeply."

"Don't thank me; thank Louise Joyce, who is both client and friend, and the one to whom I owe this pleasure." He bowed. "I never before had the opportunity of entertaining a 'psychic,' and I welcome the opportunity."

She did not quite know how to take him, and neither did Victor; and perceiving that doubt, Bartol added: "I am quite sincere in all this. I hear a good deal, obscurely, of this curious phase of human life, but never before have I been confronted by one who claims the power of divination."

"Pardon me, sir, I do not claim such power."

"Do you not! I thought that was precisely your claim."

"No, sir, I am a medium. I report what is given to me. I divine nothing of myself. I am an instrument through which those whom men call 'the dead' speak."

"I see," he mused. "I will not deceive you," he began again, very gravely. "This charge against you is likely to prove serious, and you must be quite frank with me. I may require a test of your powers."

"I am at your service, sir. Make any test of me you please--this moment if you like."

"I will not require anything of you to-night. Writers tell me that 'mediums' are a dark, elusive, and uncanny set, Mrs. Ollnee, and I must confess that you upset my preconceptions."

"There are all kinds of mediums, as there are all kinds of lawyers, Mr. Bartol. I am human, like the others."

"If you will permit me, I will take up your defense along the lines of hypnotic control on the part of this man Pettus."

"I cannot presume to advise you, sir, but you must know that to me these Voices come from the spirit world. I am the transmitter merely--for instance, at this moment I hear a Voice and I see behind you the form of a lady, a lovely young woman--"

"Mother!" called Victor, warningly. "Don't start in on that!"

"Proceed," said Bartol; "I am interested."

The psychic, leaning forward slightly, fixed her wide, deep-blue eyes upon him. "The maid conducted me to the room which had been your wife's, but I could not stay there. This lady who stands beside you took me by the hand and led me away to another room. She is nodding at me now."

"Do you mean the maid led you from the room?"

"No, I mean the spirit now standing behind you led me here. She says her name is Margaret Bartol. She said: '_Comfort my dear husband. Restore his faith._' She is smiling at me. She wants me to go on."

Bartol's face remained inscrutably calm. "Where does the form seem to be?"

"At your right shoulder. She says, '_Tell him Walter and Hattie are both with me._' She listened a moment. She says, '_Tell him Walter's mind is perfectly clear now._'"

Victor thought he saw the lawyer start in surprise, but his voice was cold as he said, "Go on."

"She says: '_Tell him the way is open. I am here. Ask him to speak to me._'"

Bartol then spoke, but his tone plainly showed that he was testing his client's hallucination and not addressing himself to the imaginary ghost. "Are you there, Margaret?"

"_Yes_," came the answer, clearly though faintly.

The renowned lawyer gazed at the medium with eyes that burned deep, and presently he asked, "What have you to say to me?"

Again came the clear, silvery whisper: "_Much. Trust the medium. She will comfort you._"

Victor thrilled to the importance of this moment, and much as he feared for his mother's success, he could not but admire the courage which blazed in her steady eyes. She was no longer afraid of this mighty man of the law, to whom heaven and hell were obsolete words. She was panoplied with the magic and mystery of death, and waited calmly for him to continue.

At last he said: "Go on. I am listening."

Again through the flower-scented, silent room the sibilant voice stole its way. "_Father._"

"Who is speaking?"

"_Margaret._"

"Margaret? What Margaret?"

"_Your 'rascal' Peggy._"

Bartol certainly started at this reply, which conveyed an expression of mirth, but his questions continued formal.

"What is your will with me?"

"_Mamma is here--and Walter._"

"Can they speak?"

"_They will try._"

Again silence fell upon the room--a silence so profound that every insect's stir was a rude interruption. At length another whisper, clearer, louder, made itself heard: "_Alexander, be happy. I live._"

"Who are you?"

"_Your wife._"

"You say so. Can you prove your identity?"

The whisper grew fainter. "_I will try. It is hard. Good-by._"

Bartol raised his hand to his head with a gesture of surprise. "I thought I felt a touch on my hair."

"The lady touched you as she passed away," Mrs. Ollnee explained. "She has gone. They are all gone now."

"I am sorry," he said, in polite disappointment. "I wanted to pursue the interrogation. Is this the usual method of your communications?"

"This is one way. They write sometimes, and sometimes they speak through a megaphone; sometimes they materialize a face or a hand."

He remained in profound thought for a few moments, then starting up, spoke with decision: "You are tired. Go to bed. We'll have plenty of time to take up these matters to-morrow. Please feel at home here and stay as long as you wish."

A little later he took Victor to his room, and as they stood there he remarked, "Of course, all this may be and probably is mind-reading and ventriloquism--subconscious, of course."

"But the writing," said Victor. "You must see that. That is the weirdest thing she does. It is baffling."

"My boy, the whole universe is baffling to me," his host replied, and into his voice came that tone of tragic weariness which affected the youth like a strain of solemn music. "The older I grow the more senseless, hopelessly senseless, human life appears; but I must not say such things to you. Good-night."

"Good-night," responded Victor, with swelling throat. "We owe you a great deal."

"Don't speak of it!" the lawyer commanded, and closed the door behind him.

Victor dropped into a chair. What a day this had been! Within twenty-four hours he had seen and loved the dream-face of Altair and had been blown upon by the winds from the vast chill and empty regions of space. He had resented Leo's voice in the night, but had returned to her in the light of the morning. On the dreamy lagoon he had been her lover again, pulling at the oar with savage joy, and on the grass in the sunlight he had been the man unafraid and victorious. Then came the hurried return, the visit to the court, the rescue of his mother--and here now he lay in the charity bed of his mother's lawyer! "Truly I am being hurried," he said; and recalling Miss Aiken's final menacing remark, he added: "And if that girl and her brother can do it mother will be sent to prison." Much as he feared these accusing witnesses, he acknowledged a kind of fierce beauty in Florence Aiken's face.

As he lay thus, thinking deeply yet drowsily upon his problems, he heard a faint ticking sound beneath his head. It was too regular and persistent to be a chance creaking of the cloth, and he rose and shook the pillow to dislodge the insect which he imagined might have flown in at the window.

The ticking continued. "I wonder if that _is_ a fly?"

The ticking seemed to reply, "No," by means of one decided rap. To test it, he asked, "Are you a spirit?"

The tick counted one, two, three--"_Yes._"

"Some one to speak to me?"

_Tick, tick, tick_--"Yes."

The answer was so plainly intelligent that the boy, silent with amazement, not unmixed with fear, lay for a few minutes in puzzled inaction. At length he asked, "Who is it--Father?"

"Tick"--No.

"_Grandfather?_"

"_No._"

He hesitated before asking the next question. "Is it Altair?"

"_No._"

He thought again. "Is it Walter Bartol?"

The answer was joyously instant. "_Yes, yes, yes!_"

"Do you wish to speak to me?"

"_Yes._"

"About your father?"

"_Yes._"

"Through my mother?"

Now came one of those baffling changes. The answer was faintly slow, "Tick, tick," betraying uncertainty--and succeeding queries elicited no response.

Victor, excited and eager, would have gone to his mother for aid had he known where to find her room. The mood for marvels was upon him now, and Altair and Margaret, and all the rest of the impalpable throng, seemed waiting in the dusk and silence to communicate with him. Hopelessly wide awake, he lay, while the big clock on the landing rang its little chime upon the quarter hours, but no further sign was given him of the presence of his intangible visitor; and at last the experience of the day became as unsubstantial as his dreams.

He was awakened by the cackling of fowls and the bleating of calves and lambs. The sun was shining through the leafy top of a tree which lay almost against his window, and happy shadows were dancing like fairies on the coverlet of his bed.

"It sounds like a real farm!" he drowsily murmured, filled with the peace of those cries, which typify the most ancient and unchanging parts of the cottager's life.

He had known only the poetic side of farm life. He had seen it, heard it, tasted it only as the lad out for a holiday, and it all seemed serene and joyous to him. To his mind the luxury of quietly dozing to the music of a barn-yard was the natural habit of the farmer. He did not attempt to rise till he heard the voice of his host from the lawn beneath his window.

A half an hour later he found Bartol in the barn-yard surveying a span of colts which his farmer was leading back and forth before him. They were lanky, thin-necked creatures, but Victor knew enough of horses to perceive in them signs of a famous breed of trotters.

"You are a real farmer," he said, as he came up to his host.

Bartol seemed pleased. "I made it pay five per cent. last year," he responded, with pride. "Of course that means counting in my time as a farmer, and not as a lawyer. How did you sleep?"

"Pretty well--when I got at it. I was a little excited and didn't go off as I usually do when I hit the pillow."

"No wonder! I had a restless night myself." He nodded to the hostler. "That will do," and turned away. "I gave a great deal of thought to your mother's case. The fact seems to be that the human organism is a great deal more complicated than we're permitted ourselves to admit, and the tendency of the ordinary man is to make the habitual commonplace, no matter how profoundly mysterious it may be at the outset. Of course at bottom we know very little of the most familiar phenomenon. Why does fire burn and water run? No one really knows."

They were facing the drive, which curved like a lilac ribbon through the green of the lawn, and the estate to Victor's eyes had all the charm of a park combined with the suggestive music of a farmstead.

"It's beautiful here!" he exclaimed.

"I'm glad you like it, and I hope you and your mother will stay till we have put you both straight with the world."

"If I could only do something to pay my freight, Mr. Bartol. I feel like a beggar and a fool to be so helpless. I was not expecting to be kicked out of college, and I'm pretty well rattled, I'll confess."

"You keep your poise notably," the lawyer replied, with kindly glance. "To be so suddenly introduced to the mystery and the chicanery of the world would bewilder an older and less emotional man."

They breakfasted in a big room filled with the sunlight. Through the open windows the scent of snowy flowers drifted, and the food and service were of a sort that Victor had never seen. A big grape-fruit, filled with sugar and berries; corn-cakes, crisp and golden; bacon delicately broiled, together with eggs (baked in little earthen cups), and last of all, coffee of such fragrance that it seemed to vie with the odor of the flowers without. Each delicious dish was served deftly, quietly, by a sweet-faced maid, who seemed to feel a filial interest in her master.

The service was a revelation of the perfection to which country life can be brought by one who has both wealth and culture; and Victor wondered that any one could be sad amid such radiant surroundings.

"I can't see why you ever return to the city," he said, with conviction.

Bartol smiled. "That's the perversity of our human nature. If I were forced to live here all the time the farm might pall upon me, just as if all seasons were spring. As it is, I come back to it from the turmoil of the town with never-cloying appetite. Per contra, these maids and my farm-hands find a visit to the city their keenest delight. To them the parks and the artificial ponds are more beautiful than anything in nature." His tone changed. "In truth, I live on and do my work more from force of habit than from zest. So far as I can, I get back to the simple animal existence, where sun and air and food are the never-failing pleasures. I try to forget that I am a pursuer of criminals. I return to my work in the city, as I say, because it helps to keep my appetite for the rural things. I can't afford to let silence and green trees pall upon me. If I were a little more of a believer," he smiled, "I would say that you and your mother had been sent to me, for of late I have been in a deeper slough of despair than at any time since the death of my wife. I am curious to see how all this is going to affect your mother. She may find it very lonely here."

"Oh, I'm sure she will not."

"Well, now, I must be off. But before I go I will show you the catalogues of my library; and perhaps I can bring home some books which will bear on these occult subjects. I have given orders that no information as to you shall go off the place; and your mother is safe here. You may read, or hoe in the garden, or ride a horse."

"I wish I might go to the city with you."

"My judgment is against it. Stay here for a few days till we see which way the wind is blowing." And with a cheery wave of his hand he drove away, leaving Victor on the porch with the feeling of being marooned on an island--a peaceful and beautiful island, but an island nevertheless.

XI

LOVE'S TRANSLATION

To tell the truth, Victor dreaded being left alone with his mother in this way. He was fully aware now of the invisible barrier between them. No matter what explanation was finally offered, she could never be the same to him again, for whether it was her subconscious self which had cunningly lured them all to the verge of disaster, or some uncontrollable impulse coming from without, in the light any explanation, she was no longer the sweet, gentle, normal mother he had hitherto thought her to be.

It was not a question of being in possession of strange abilities, it was a question of being obsessed by some diabolical power--of being the prey of malignant demons avid to destroy.

The more deeply he thought upon all that had come to him, the more bewildered he became; and to avoid this tumult, which brought no result, he went out and wandered about the farm. His experience was like visiting a foreign country, for the men were either Swiss or German; and the walls of the farm-yard quite as un-American in their massiveness and their formal arrangement--a vivid contrast to the flimsy structures of the neighboring village. The servants (that is what they were, servants) treated him with the trained deference of those who for generations have touched their caps to the more fortunate beings of the earth, and these signs of subordination were distinctly soothing to the youth's disturbed condition of mind. Instantly, and without effort, he assumed the air of the young aristocrat they thought him.

He strolled down the road to the village, which was a collection of small frame cottages in neat lawns, surrounding a few general stores and a greasy, fly-specked post-office. Here was the unimaginative, the prosaic, perfectly embodied. Old men, bent and gray, were gossiping from benches and boxes under the awnings. Clerks in their shirt-sleeves were lolling over counters. A few farmers' teams stood at the iron hitching-posts with drowsy, low-hanging heads. Neither doubt nor dismay nor terror had footing here. The majesty of dawn, the mystery of midnight, did not touch these peaceful and phlegmatic souls. The spirit of man was to them less than an abstraction and the tumult of the city a far-off roar as of distant cataracts.

Furthermore, these matter-of-fact folk had abundant curiosity and no reverence, and they all stared at Victor with round, absorbent gaze, as if with candid intent to take full invoice of his clothing, and to know him again in any disguise. He heard them say, one after the other, as he passed along, "Visitor of Bartol's, I guess." And he could understand that this explanation really explained, for Bartol's "Castle" was the resting-place of many strange birds of passage.

Bartol was, indeed, the constant marvel of Hazel Grove. Why had he bought the place? Why, after it was bought, should he spend so much money on it? And finally, why should he employ "foreigners"? These were a few of the queries which were put and answered and debated in the shade of the furniture store and around the air-tight store of the grocery. His farm was their never-failing wonder tale. The building of a new wall was an excitement, each whitewashing of a picket fence an event. They knew precisely the hour of departure of each blooded ram or bull, and the birth of each colt was discussed as if another son and heir had come to the owner.

Naturally, therefore, all visitors to "Hazeldean" came in for study and comment--especially because it was well known that Bartol stood high in the political councils of the party (was indeed mentioned for senator), and that his guests were likely to be "some punkins" in the world. "This young feller is liable to be the son of one of his millionaire clients," was the comment of the patient sitters. "Husky chap, ain't he?"

Feeling something of this comment, and sensing also the sleepy materialism of the inhabitants, Victor regained much of his own disbelief in the miraculous, and yet just to that degree did the pain in his heart increase, for it made of his mother something so monstrous that the conception threatened all his love and reverence for her. Pity sprang up in place of the filial affection he had once known. He began to make new excuses for her. "It must be that she has become so suggestible that every sitter's mind governs her. In a sense, that removes her responsibility." And so he walked back, with all his pleasure in the farm and village eaten up by his care.

His mother was waiting for him on the porch, and as he came up, asked with shining face:

"Isn't this heavenly, Victor?"

"It is very beautiful," he replied, but with less enthusiasm than she expected.

"To think that yesterday I was threatened with the prison, and now--this! We have much to thank Mr. Bartol for."

"That's just it, mother. What claim have we on this big, busy man? What right have we to sit here?"

The brightness of her face dimmed a little, but she replied bravely: "I have always paid my way, Victor, and I am sure last night's message meant much to Mr. Bartol. I always help people. If I bring back a belief in immortality do I not make fullest recompense to my host? My gift is precious, and yet I cannot sell it--I can only give it--and so when I am offered bed and board in return for my work I am not ashamed to take it. The kings of the earth are glad to honor those who, like myself, have the power to penetrate the veil."

Never before had she ventured upon so frank a defense of her vocation, and Victor listened with a new conception of her powers. As she continued she took on dignity and quiet force.

"The medium gives more for her wages than any earthly soul; and when you consider that we make the grave a gateway to the light, that our hands part the veil between the seen and the unseen, then you will see that our gifts are not abnormal, but supernormal. God has given us these powers to comfort mankind, to afford a new revelation to the world."

"Why didn't you make me a medium?" he asked, thrusting straight at her heart. "Why did you send me away from it all?"

Her eyes fell, her voice wavered. "Because I was weak--an earthly mother. My selfish love and pride overpowered me. I could not see you made ashamed--and besides my controls advised it for the time."

He took a seat where he could look up into her face. "Mother, tell me this--haven't you noticed that your controls generally advise the things you believe in?"