CHAPTER XXIII
A PROPHET INDEED!
While Will Deverill’s operetta was still in rehearsal at the Duke of Edinburgh’s, a little episode occurred at Rue’s house in Hans Place, which was not without a certain weird influence of its own on the after-life of herself and her companions.
Rue gave an At Home one night early in March, to which Florian and Will Deverill were invited. Will brought his sister with him – the sister who was married to an East End curate, and who had called upon Rue at her brother’s bidding.
“Well, what do you think of her to-night, Maud?” Will asked a little anxiously as they stood alone for a minute or two in the middle of the evening.
Mrs Sartoris curled her lip. “Oh, she’s pretty enough,” she answered; “pretty enough, after her fashion. I could see that the first time; and she’s got nice manners. She lights up well, too; women of her age always do light up well. They look better by night, even in the searching glare of these electric lamps, than in full broad sunshine. But, of course, she hasn’t got quite the tone of our set; you couldn’t expect it. A faded air of drapery clings about her to the end. That’s the way with these people; they may be ever so rich, they may be ever so fascinating – but a discriminating nose still scents trade in them somewhere.”
Will smiled a quiet smile of suppressed amusement. He didn’t care to answer her. Rue’s father, he knew, had been an episcopal clergyman in New York, and she herself, though she married a dry-goodsman, had been every bit as well brought up as Will and his sister. But ’tis a sisterly way to say these disparaging things about women whom one’s brother might be suspected of marrying. Will didn’t mean to marry Rue, it is true; but Maud thought he might; and that idea alone was more than enough to give a caustic tone to her critical comments.
The feature of the evening, it seemed, was to be a peculiar séance of a new American phenomenon, who had come over to Europe with a wonderful reputation for thought-reading, hypnotism, and what he was pleased to style “magnetic influences.” Like most of her countrymen and countrywomen, Rue had a sneaking regard, in the background of her soul, for mesmerism, spiritualism, psychic force, electro-biology, and the occult and mysterious in human nature generally. She was one of those impressionable women, in short, who fall a ready prey to plausible impostors with voluble talk about ethereal vibrations, telepathic energy, the odic fluid, and the rest of such rubbish, unless strong-minded male friends intervene to prevent them. The medium on this occasion, it appeared, was one Joaquin Holmes, otherwise known as the Colorado Seer, who professed to read the inmost thoughts of man or woman by direct brainwaves, without contact of any sort. The guests that night had been specially invited to meet Mr Holmes on this his first appearance at a séance in London; so about ten o’clock, all the world trooped down to the dining-room, which Florian had cunningly arranged as a temporary lecture-hall, with seats in long rows, and an elevated platform at one end for the medium.
“What an odd-looking man!” Mrs Sartoris exclaimed, as the Colorado Seer, in full evening dress, bowed a graceful bow from his place on the platform. “He’s handsome, though, isn’t he? Such wonderful eyes! Just look! And such a Spanish complexion!”
“A Hidalgo, every inch!” Florian assented gravely, nodding his head, and looking at him as he would have looked at a Velasquez. “That olive-brown skin points back straight to Andalusia. It doesn’t want his name to tell one at a glance that if his father was an American of English descent, his mother’s folk must have emigrated from Cordova or Granada. I see a Moslem tinge in cheek and eye; those dusky thin fingers are the Moor all over!”
“For Moor, read blackamoor,” Colonel Quackenboss, the military attaché to the American Legation, murmured half under his breath to his next-door neighbour.
And they were each of them right, in his own way and fashion. The Colorado Seer was a very handsome man, somewhat swarthier than is usual with pure-blooded Europeans. His eyes were large and dark and brilliant; his abundant black hair fell loose over his brow with a graceful southern curl; a heavy moustache fringed his upper lip; he looked to the unsophisticated European eye like a pleasing cross between Buffalo Bill and a Castilian poet. But his Christian name of Joaquin and his southern skin had descended to him, not from Andalusian Hidalgos, but from a mother who was partly Spanish and partly negress, with a delicate under-current of Red Indian ancestry. As he stood there on the platform, however, in his becoming evening dress, and flooded them with the light of his lustrous dark eyes – ’twas a trick of the trade he had learned in Colorado – every woman in the room felt instinctively to herself he was a superb creature, while every man admitted with a grudging smile that the fellow had at least the outward air of a gentleman.
The Seer, stepping forward with a genial smile, entertained them at first with some common little tricks of so-called thought-reading, familiar enough to all those who have ever attempted to watch the ways of that simple exhibition. He found pins concealed in ladies’ skirts, and guessed the numbers of bank-notes in financiers’ pockets. Florian’s mouth curled incredulity; why, these were just the same futile old games as ever, the well-known and innocent little conjuring dodges of the Bishops and the Stuart Cumberlands! But after awhile, Mr Joaquin Holmes, waking up all at once, proceeded to try something newer and more original. A pack of cards was produced. To avoid all suspicion of collusion or trickery, ’twas a brand-new pack – observe, there’s no deception – bought by Rue herself that afternoon in Bond Street. With much air of serious mystery, the Colorado Seer pulled off the stamped cover before their very eyes, gave the cards themselves to Will to shuffle, and then proceeded to offer them to every member of the company one by one in order. Each drew a card, looked at it, and replaced it in the pack. Instantly, the Seer in a very loud voice, without one moment’s hesitation, announced it correctly as ten of spades, ace of clubs, five of hearts, or queen of diamonds. It was an excellent trick, and the performer could do it equally well with open eyes or blindfolded; he could offer the cards behind his back, after the pack had been shuffled and handed him unseen; he could even succeed in the dark, he said, if the lights were lowered, and each person in the company took his own card out to inspect it in the passage.
“That looks like genuine thought-reading,” Will was compelled to admit, thinking it over in his own mind; “but perhaps he forces his cards. One knows conjurers can do such wonderful things in the way of forcing.”
Instantly the Seer turned upon him with an air of injured innocence. “If you think there’s any conjuring about this performance,” he exclaimed, with much dignity, drawing himself up to his full height of six feet two, “you can offer them yourself, and allow each lady and gentleman in the room to pick as they choose for themselves among them. I’ll take each card, blindfold, as fast as they pick, hold it up behind my back, with my hands tied, without seeing it myself, and read off for you what it is by direct thought-transference.”
Will accepted the test – a fairly severe one; and, sure enough, the Seer was right. Carefully blindfolded with one of those moulded wraps, invented for the purpose, which prevent all possibility of looking down through the chinks, he yet took each card behind his back in one hand, held it up before their eyes without moving his head, and gave out its name distinctly and instantly. The audience was impressed. There was a touch of magic in it. But the Seer smiled blandly.
“Oh, that’s nothing,” he murmured aloud, with a deprecating little laugh; “a mere matter of choosing between fifty-two alternatives – which, after all, is easy. With Mrs Palmer’s consent,” and he turned in a gracefully deferential attitude to Rue, “I can show you something a great deal more remarkable. Here are pencils and papers. Each lady or gentleman will please take a sheet as I hand them round. Write anything you like, in English, French, German or Spanish, on the piece of paper. Then fold it up, so, and put it into one of these envelopes gummed down and fastened. After that, as this experiment requires very great concentration of thought” – he knitted his brows, and assumed an expression of the intensest internal effort – “with Mrs Palmer’s kind leave, we will turn out the electric light, which confuses and distracts one by revealing to the eye so many surrounding visible objects. And then, without breaking the envelopes in which you have enclosed the pieces of paper, I will read out to you, in the dark, what each of you has written.”
He spoke deliberately, with slow western American distinctness, though with a pleasing accent. That accent, superimposed on his native negro dialect, had cost him no small effort. The guests, half-incredulous, took the sheets of paper he distributed to them one by one, and wrote down a sentence or two, according to taste, after a little interval of whispered consultation. Then, by the Seer’s direction, they folded the slips in two and placed them in their envelopes, each bearing outside the name of the person who wrote it. Florian collected the papers, all carefully gummed down, and handed them to the Seer, who stood ready to receive them at his place on the platform. Without one moment’s delay, the lights were turned out. It was the instantaneousness, indeed, and the utter absence of the usual hocus-pocus, that distinguished Mr Joaquin Holmes’s unique performance from the ordinary style of spiritualist conjuring. In a second, the Seer’s voice rang out clear from his place: “First envelope, Mrs Palmer, containing inscription in French – very prettily written:
‘La vie est brève:
Un peu d’amour,
Un peu de rêve,
Et puis – bonjour.
La vie est vaine:
Un peu d’espoir,
Un peu de haine,
Et puis – bonsoir.’
“Extremely graceful verses; I don’t know the author. However, no matter!.. Second envelope, Colonel Marchmont, containing inscription in English, ‘The general immediately ordered an advance, and the gallant 21st, regardless of danger, charged for the battery in magnificent style, sabring the enemy’s gunners in a wild outburst of military enthusiasm.’ Very characteristic! A most soldierly choice. And boldly written… Third envelope, Mrs Sartoris, – stop, please! the lady’s thoughts are wandering; kindly fix your attention for a moment, Madam, on the words you have given me. Ah, so; that’s better. – ‘The curfew tolls the knell of parting day; The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea; The ploughman homeward wends’ – wends? wends? it should have been ‘plods’; but ‘wends’ is what you thought – ‘The ploughman homeward wends his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me.’ Very appropriate; it’s dark enough here! And I am the only speaker. Bend your minds to what you have written, please, or I may have to hesitate. Each think of your own… Fourth envelope, Mr Florian Wood, containing inscription:
‘We struggle fain to enlarge
Our bounded physical recipiency,
Increase our power, supply fresh oil to life,
Repair the waste of age and sickness: no,
It skills not! life’s inadequate to joy,
As the soul sees joy, tempting life to take.’
An exceedingly appropriate quotation! I forget where it comes from. Try to concentrate your mind, Mr Wood. Ah, now I know! – from Browning’s Cleon.”
Florian’s mellifluous voice broke the silence in the auditory. “This is wonderful!” he said, in his impressive tone, “most wonderful! miraculous! I never heard anything in my life to equal it.”
The Seer, noting his advantage, didn’t pause for a moment to answer the interruption, but, smiling a self-satisfied though invisible smile, which could be heard in his voice in spite of the dense darkness, went on still more rapidly, “Fifth envelope, Lady Martindale, a familiar quotation, ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.’ Somewhat hackneyed that, but easy enough to read on her brain for that very reason… Sixth envelope, Sir Henry Martindale – I regret to say, a confirmed sceptic; Sir Henry didn’t believe I could read his thoughts, so he wrote down these rude words: ‘The performance is a sham, and the man’s a humbug.’ But the performance is not a sham, and the man’s a thought-reader. Sir Henry also wrote three words below in the Russian character, which he learnt in the Crimea. Now, I don’t know Russian, and I can’t pretend to read thoughts in languages I don’t understand, any more than I could pretend to repeat a conversation I happened to overhear on top of an omnibus in Japanese or Hottentot. But I can tell Sir Henry what he thought in English as he wrote those words; he thought to himself, ‘That’s a puzzler for him, that is; I’ll bet five quid that’ll beat the fellow.’ ”
The audience laughed at this unexpected sally. Sir Henry felt uncomfortable. But the Seer, unabashed, went on as before, without an instant’s pause, to the succeeding envelopes. He ran through them all in the same rapid manner, till he reached the last, “Miss Violet Farrar, – kindly concentrate your thoughts on the subject, Señorita, – Miss Farrar wrote a couple of lines from Swinburne:
‘Thou hast forgotten, O summer swallow,
But the world shall end when I forget.’
That’s the last I received!” He drew a deep sigh. Then without one instant interposed, “Turn up the lights, please,” he said. “To show all’s fair, I’ll return you your envelopes.”
Will turned the light on again in a turmoil of surprise. He had never before seen anything that looked so like a genuine miracle. There stood the Seer, erect and smiling, with all the envelopes in a huddled heap on the little round table on the platform beside him. With a quiet air of triumph, he stepped down to the floor, and reading out the names as he walked along the rows, replaced in each outstretched hand – its own envelope, unopened. The visitors tore the covers off before his eyes, and found inside – their own manuscript, exactly as they had written it. It was a most convincing trick, and the Colorado Seer had good cause to be proud of the astounded way in which his company received it.
A buzz of voices ran humming round the room for some minutes together as the Seer concluded. Everybody hazarded some conjecture of his own, more or less inept, as to how the man did it. The younger ladies were mostly of opinion that he “must have a confederate” – though how a confederate could help him with this particular trick, they didn’t deign to explain, not having, indeed, any clear picture of their own in their sapient heads as to the nature of the confederacy. They merely threw out the hint in the self-same expansive and generous spirit in which they are wont to opine that “it’s done by electricity,” or, that “the thing has springs in it.” Mr Arthur Sartoris, the East End curate, and two old maids with amiable profiles in a back row, were inclined to set it down to “cerebral undulations in the ethereal medium” – which, of course, would be competent to explain almost anything, if they only existed. Lady Martindale leaned rather towards the extremer view that “the man had dealings with a familiar spirit,” and objected to take any further part in such doubtful proceedings. Sir Henry, while not venturing to offer any direct explanation, was yet reminded at once of some very remarkable and surprising feats he had seen performed by a fakir in India, who had told him the name of his future wife, made a mango-tree grow and bear fruit before his eyes, and sent a boy to climb up a loose end of twine till he disappeared in space, whence he was precipitated in fragments a few minutes later, to get up and walk away one moment afterwards, at the first touch of the fakir’s wand, as cool and unconcerned as if nothing had happened. Everybody had a theory which satisfied himself; and every theory alike seemed pure bosh to Will Deverill.
To everybody’s surprise, however, Florian’s melodious voice, after that one interruption, took no further part in the brisk discussion. The world rather expected that Florian would intervene with some abstruse hypothesis of telepathic action, or enlarge on the occult influence of soul upon soul, without the need for any gross and palpable link of material connection. But Florian held his peace. He had an idea of his own, and he wasn’t going to impart it for nothing to anybody. Only once did he speak. “The man has eyes in the back of his head,” a lady had cried after one trick in profound astonishment.
“Say, rather, the man has eyes in the tips of his fingers,” Florian corrected gravely. For he was no fool, Florian.
The Seer heard him, and darted a strange glance at his face. This man Wood was too clever. The Seer must square him!
The evening wore away, and conjecture died down. The Seer mixed with the throng in his private capacity, told good stories to the men with a strong Western flavour, said pretty things to the women with Parisian grace, and flashed his expressive eyes into theirs to point them. Everybody allowed he was a most agreeable man, and everybody thought his performance “simply marvellous.”
Florian waited on the door-step as the Seer was leaving. “I’ll walk home with you,” he said, with an air of quiet determination.
The Seer stared at him hard. “As you like,” he answered, coldly; but it was clear from his tone he distrusted Florian.
They walked round the corner for some yards in silence. Then Florian spoke first. “There was only one thing I didn’t quite understand,” he began, with a confidential air, “and that was how the dickens you managed to get those gummed envelopes open.”
The Seer stood still for a second, and fronted him. They were in a lonely street. “Now, you look here, Mr Florian Wood,” the American said quietly, dropping back all at once into his native dialect and his native accent, “you lay low this evening. You thought you spotted it. I saw you lay low, and I knew pretty well you meant to come round and have it out some time with me. Well, sir, what do you mean by insinuating to a gentleman like me that I broke those there envelopes? That’s an imputation on my honesty and honour; and out West, you know, we answer questions like that only one way.. with a six-shooter.”
He spoke with the menacing air of an angry bully. But Florian wasn’t exactly the sort of man to be bullied; small as he was, he did not lack for courage. If Mr Joaquin Holmes was tall and big-built, why, Florian was backed up by all the strength of the police of London. The Englishman smiled. “Yes, you do, out West, I know,” he answered, calmly; “but in London, that style’s very much out of fashion. We keep a police force on purpose to prevent it. Now, don’t let’s be two fools. I lay low, as you say. If you want me to go on lying low in future, you’ll answer me sensibly, like a man of the world, and trust my honour. If you want me to expose you, you’ll tell lies and bluster. You’ve had twenty pounds down from my friend Mrs Palmer for this evening’s entertainment. That’s first-rate pay. You can’t earn it again, if your system’s blown upon.”
The Coloradan darted a furtive side-glance at Florian. This sleek-faced, innocent-looking, high-flown little Englishman was more dangerous, after all, than the Westerner imagined. But he blustered still for a while about his honour and his honesty; he was ashamed to throw up the sponge so easily. Florian listened, unmoved. All this talk fell flat upon him. At last, when the Seer had exhausted his whole stock of available indignation, Florian interposed once more, bland and suave as ever: “It’s a very good trick,” the small man said, smiling, “and I don’t know how you managed that part about the envelopes… Besides, I never met such delicacy of touch in my life before – in a sighted person!”
At that word, Joaquin Holmes gave a perceptible start. He saw its implications. It is the term which the blind in asylums or the like invariably apply to the outside world with normal vision.
Florian noticed the little start, all involuntary as it was; and the Seer in turn observed that he noticed it. No man can play the thought-reading or spiritualist game unless endowed with exceptional quickness of perception.
“How did you know I’d ever been blind?” he asked, quickly, taken aback for a moment, and making just that once an unguarded admission.
“I didn’t know it,” Florian answered, with equal frankness. “I didn’t even guess it. But I saw at once you’d at least been bred and brought up among the blind. My own grandfather was blind, you see, and my uncle as well; and I’ve inherited from them, myself, some germs of the same faculty. But you’ve got it stronger than anyone I ever saw in my life till now… Besides, I want to know how you managed those envelopes. I hate being baffled. When I see a good trick, I like to understand it. Remember, I have influence in the press and in Society. I can serve your purpose. But I make it the price of my lying low in future that you tell me the way you managed about the envelopes.”
The Seer seized his arm. “You’re a durned smart chap,” he said, with genuine admiration. “Nobody, even in America, ever guessed that trick; and we’re smarter out there, I reckon, than the run of the old country. Come along to my rooms, and we’ll talk this thing over.”
“No thank you,” Florian answered, with a quiet little smile. “My friends wouldn’t know where I’d gone to-night. Your hint about six-shooters is quite too pregnant. But if you care to come home to my humble chambers in Grosvenor Gardens, and make terms of surrender, we can see this thing out over a whiskey and soda.”