XII
A MOONLIGHT CALL AND A VISION
Upon rising from the dinner table the young people returned to their books, and at ten o'clock Leo lifted her eyes from her page. "Did some one drive up?"
Victor looked at her dazedly. "I didn't hear anybody. Proceed."
"Mercy! It's ten o'clock. Where are Aunt Louise and your mother? I hear Mr. Bartol's voice!" she exclaimed, rising hastily. "Let's go get the latest news."
The master of the house entered before the young people could shake off the spell of what they had been imagining.
"What a waste of good moonlight!" he exclaimed, with smiling sympathy. "Why aren't you youngsters out on the lawn?"
"It's all your fault," responded Leo. "We've been absorbing one of the books you sent up."
"Have you? It must have been a wonderful romance. I can't conceive of anything but a love-story keeping youth indoors on a night like this."
Victor defended her. "We've been reading of Morselli's wonderful experiments. It's in Italian, and Miss Wood has been translating it for me."
"What luck you have!" exclaimed Mr. Bartol. "I engage her to re-translate it for me at the same rate."
Mrs. Ollnee and Mrs. Joyce came in as he was speaking, and Mrs. Joyce, after disposing herself comfortably, said, "Well, what is your report?"
He confessed that he had been too busy with other matters to give the Aiken accusation much thought. "However, I sent an armful of books out to my assistant attorney." He waved his hand toward Victor.
"You don't mean to read books," protested Mrs. Joyce, energetically, "when you've the very source of all knowledge right here in your own house? Why don't you study your client and convince yourself of her powers? – then you'll know what to do and say."
"I had thought of that," he said, hesitantly. "But – "
"You need not fear," Mrs. Joyce assured him. "It's true Lucy cannot always furnish the phenomena on the instant. In fact, the more eager she is the more reluctant the forces are; but you can at least try, and she is not only willing but eager for the test."
Bartol turned to Mrs. Ollnee. "Are you prepared now – to-night?" he asked.
"Yes, this moment," she answered.
Mrs. Joyce exulted. "The power is on her. I can see that. See how her hand trembles! One finger is signaling. Don't you see it?"
Mr. Bartol rose. "Come with me into my study. Mrs. Joyce may come some other time. I do not want any witnesses to-night," he added, with a smile.
Victor watched his mother go into Bartol's study with something of the feeling he might have had in seeing her enter the den of a lion. She seemed very helpless and very inexperienced in contrast with this great inquisitor, so skilled in cross-examination, so inexorable in logic, so menacing of eye.
Leo, perceiving Victor's anxiety, proposed that they return to the porch, and to this he acceded, though it seemed like a cowardly desertion of his mother. "Poor little mother," he said. "If she stands up against him she's a wonder."
The girl stretched herself out on the swinging couch, and the youth took his seat on a wicker chair close beside her. Mrs. Joyce kept at a decent distance, so that if the young people had anything private to say she might reasonably appear not to have overheard it.
Talk was spasmodic, for neither of them could forget for a moment the duel which was surely going on in that inner room. Indeed, Mrs. Joyce openly spoke of it. "If Lucy is not too anxious, too eager, she will change Alexander's whole conception of the universe this night."
"Of course you're exaggerating, Aunt Louise; but I certainly expect her to shake him up."
"It only needs one genuine phenomenon to convince him of her sincerity. What a warrior for the cause he would make! She must stay right here in his house till she utterly overwhelms him. He took up her case at first merely because I asked him to do so; but he likes her, and is ready to take it up on her own account if he finds her sincere. But I want him to believe in the philosophy she represents."
Half an hour passed with no sign from within, and Mrs. Joyce began to yawn. "That ride made me sleepy."
"Why don't you go to bed?" suggested Leo.
She professed concern. "And leave Lucy unguarded?"
"Nonsense! Go to bed and sleep. Mr. Ollnee and I will stand guard till the ordeal is ended."
"I believe I'll risk it," decided Mrs. Joyce. "I can hardly keep my eyes open."
"Nor your mouth shut," laughed Leo. "Hasten, or you'll fall asleep on the stair."
Left alone, the young people came nigh to forgetting that the world contained aught but dim stretches of moonlit greensward, dewy trees, and the odor of lilac blooms. In the dusk Victor stood less in fear of the girl, and she, moved by the witchery of the night and the melody of his voice (into which something new and masterful had come), grew less defiant. "How still it all is?" she breathed, softly. "It is like the Elysian Fields after the city's noise and grime."
"It's more beautiful out there." He motioned toward the lawn. "Let's walk down the drive."
And she complied without hesitation, a laugh in her voice. "But not too far. Remember, we are guardian angels."
As she reached his side he took her arm and tucked it within his own. "You might get lost," he said, in jocular explanation of his action.
"How considerate you are!" she scornfully responded, but her hand remained in his keeping.
There were no problems now. Down through the soft dusk of the summer night they strolled, rapturously listening to the sounds that were hardly more than silences, feeling the touch of each other's garments, experiencing the magic thrill which leaps from maid to man and man to maid in times like these.
"How big you are!" exclaimed the girl. "I didn't realize how much you overtopped me. I am considered tall."
"And so you are – and divinely fair."
"How banal! Couldn't you think of a newer one?"
"It was as much as ever I remembered, that. I'm not a giant in poetry. I'm a dub at any fine job."
Of this quality was their talk. To those of us who are old and dim-eyed, it seems of no account, perhaps, but to those who can remember similar walks and talks it is of higher worth than the lectures in the Sorbonne. Learning is a very chill abstraction on such a night to such a pair. Would we not all go back again to this sweet land of love and longing – if we could?
Victor did not deliberately plan to draw Leonora closer to his side, and the proud girl did not intend to permit him to do so; but somehow it happened that his arm stole round her waist as they walked the shadowy places of the drive, and their laggard feet were wholly out of rhythm to their leaping pulses.
The proof of Victor's naturally dependable character lay in the fact that he presumed no further. He was content with the occasional touch of her rounded hip to his, the caressing touch of her skirt as it swung about his ankle. To have attempted a kiss would have broken the spell, would have alarmed and repelled her. He honored her, loved her, but he was still in awe of her proud glance and the imperious carriage of her head. He preferred to think she suffered rather than invited the clasp of his arm.
She, on her part, was astonished and a little scared by her own complaisant weakness, and as they came out into the lighter part of the walk she disengaged herself with a self-derisive remark, and asked, "Do you always take such good care of the arms of your girl friends?"
"Always," he replied, instantly, though his heart was still in the clutch of his new-born passion.
"I shall be on my guard next time… I see Mr. Bartol in the doorway. Don't you think we'd better go in? What time do you suppose it is?"
"The saddest time in the world for me if you are going to leave me."
"Don't be maudlin." She had recovered her self-command, and was disposed to be extra severe. "Sentimental nothings is hardly your strong point."
"What is my strong point?"
She was ready with an answer. "Plain down-right impudence."
He, too, was recovering speech. "I'm glad I have one strong trait. I was afraid there was nothing about me to make a definite impression on a proud beauty like you."
"Please don't try to be literary. Stick to your oars and your baseball raquet."
"Bat," he corrected.
"I meant bat."
"I know you did; but you said raquet."
In this juvenile spat they approached the porch where Mr. Bartol stood waiting for them.
"Young people," he called, in a voice that somehow voiced a deep emotion, "do you realize that it is midnight?"
Protesting their amazement, they mounted the steps and entered the house; but the moment they looked into their host's face they became serious, perceiving that something very tremendous had taken place in his laboratory.
"What has happened?" asked Leo. "What did she do?"
"I don't know yet," he replied, strangely inconclusive in tone and phrase. "I must think it all over. If I can persuade myself that the marvels which I have witnessed are realities, the universe is an entirely new and vastly different machine for me."
Thrilling to the excitement in his face and in his voice, they passed on. At the top of the stairs Leo faced Victor with eyes big with excitement. "What do you suppose came to him?"
"I haven't an idea. He seemed terribly wrought up, though."
"We must say good-night." She held out her hand, and he took it.
"This has been the finest, most instructive day of my life."
She released her hand with a little decisive, dismissing movement. "How nice of you! Signor Morselli should know of it. Good-night!" And the smile with which she left him was delightfully provoking and mirthful.
Victor would have gone straight to his mother had he known where to find her, for he was eager to know what had taken place in the deeps of Bartol's study. That she had been able to mystify the great lawyer, he was convinced; and yet, perhaps, this was only temporary. "He will go further. What will he find?"
He was standing before his dresser slowly removing his collar and tie when the door opened and his mother entered. She was abnormally wide awake, and her eyes, violet in their intensity, betrayed so much excitement that he exclaimed: "Why, mother, what's the matter? What kind of a session did you have? What has happened to you?"
"Victor, father tells me that Mr. Bartol will be convinced. He is the greatest mind I have ever met. If I can bring him to a belief in the spirit world it will be the most important victory of my life."
"What did he say to you? What did he think?"
"I don't know; and strange to say, I cannot read his mind. He seems convinced of the phenomena, and yet I can't tell for certain. He was skeptical at the beginning, as nearly every one is."
Hitherto, at every such opening, Victor had rushed in to pluck the heart out of her mystery, but now he restrained himself, for fear of trapping her into some admission, which would make his own testimony more difficult in court. He took a seat on the bed and regarded her with meditative eyes, and she went on.
"The Voices are clamoring round me still. They want to speak to you."
"I don't want to hear them – not to-night," he replied, coldly. "Tell them to wait and talk to me when Mr. Bartol is listening."
She seemed disappointed and a little hurt by his tone. "Altair is here. She wishes most to speak."
Interest awoke in him. "What does she want of me?"
She listened. "She says, 'Trust Mr. Bartol.'"
He could see nothing, hear nothing, therefore his face lost its light.
"Well, we've got to trust him. He's all the help in sight."
Something, a breath, the light caress of a hand, passed over his hair, and a whisper that was almost tone spoke in his ear, "Fear nothing, if you will be guided and protected."
Sweet as this voice was, it irritated him, for he could not disassociate his mother from it. Indeed, it had something subtly familiar in its utterance, and yet he could not accuse her of deceit. He only roughly said: "Don't do that! I don't like that!"
Silence followed, and then his mother sadly said: "You have hurt her. She will not speak again."
"Let her show herself. How do I know who is speaking to me? Let me see her face again." He added this in a gentler voice, being moved by a vivid memory of the exquisite picture Altair had made.
After another pause Mrs. Ollnee answered: "She will do so. She says soon. She has gone; but your father wants to speak to you."
Victor rose impatiently. "Tell him to come again some other time. I'm sleepy now."
She turned away saddened by his manner, and with a gentle "good-night" went softly from the room.
Victor regretted his bluntness, but could not free himself from a feeling that his mother's Voices were deceptive or imaginary, and her visit hurt and disgusted him so deeply that the charm of his evening's companionship with Leo was all but lost. "Part of her phenomena are real, but these Voices – " He broke off and went to his bed with a vague feeling of loss weighing him down.
For a half-hour he lay in growing bitterness, and then quite suddenly he thought he detected a thin, blue vapor rising from the rag rug at the side of his bed, and for an instant he was startled. "Is it smoke? Or do I imagine it?" As it rose and sank, expanded and contracted, he studied it closely. It was not smoke, for it did not ascend. It was more like filmy drapery tossed by a wind from a hidden aperture in the floor. Motionless, amazed, and awed, he watched it, till out of it the face of a woman looked, her wistful eyes touched with an accusing sorrow. It was Altair, and her form became more real from moment to moment, until at last he could detect the swell of her bosom, draped with the folds of a shimmering white robe. As he waited a hand appeared at her side, vaguely outlined, yet alive. He could see the fingers loosely clasped about a rose. She was so beautiful that he lay gazing at her in speechless wonder. "Am I dreaming?" he asked himself. "I must be dreaming." And yet he could feel the air from the window.
In the light of her glance he forgot all his other loves and cares. His worship for her returned like swift hunger, and he yearned to touch her, to hear her voice. "She is a dream," he decided, and his hand, lifted to test the vision, fell back upon the coverlet.
As if reading his thought, Altair put out her right arm and touched his wrist with a caress like the stroke of a beam of moonlight, so light and cold it was.
"Victor," she seemed to say, and his whisper was almost as light as her own.
"Who are you?"
"Don't you know me? I am Altair. Do not forget me."
"I will not forget you," he answered. "I can't forget you. Why do you look so sad?"
"It is cold and empty where I dwell. I come to you for happiness and warmth. You had forgotten me. You would not listen to my voice." Her reproach moved him almost to tears.
"I could not see you. I was not sure."
"I do not accuse you. It is natural for you to love. When the day comes you will seek another. One whose flesh is warm. Mine is cold. She is of the day. I am of the night. But do not refuse to speak to me."
Her bust had grown fuller, more complete as she spoke, and yet from the waist downward she seemed but a trailing garment of convoluting, phosphorescent gauze. Her left hand still hung at her side, vague, diaphanous, but her right lay upon her breast, as beautiful, as real as firelit ivory, and her face seemed to glow as though with some inward radiance.
Victor could follow the exquisite line of her brow, and her eyes were glorious pools of color, deep and dark with mystery and passion. Slowly she sank as if kneeling, her stately head lowered, bent above him, and he felt the touch of soft lips upon his own – a kiss so warm, so human that it filled his heart with worship. Gently he lifted his hand, seeking to draw her to him, and for an instant he felt her pliant body in the circle of his arms – then she dissolved, vanished – like some condensation of the atmosphere, and he was left alone, aching with longing and despair.
For a long time he waited, hoping she would return. He saw the moonlight fade from the carpet. He heard the night wind amid the maple leaves, and he knew he had not been dreaming, for that strange Oriental perfume lingered in the air, and on the coverlet where her exquisite hand had rested a white bloom lay, mystic and wonderful. He lifted it, and its breath, sweeter than that of any other flower he had ever held, filled him with instant languor and happy release of care.
His next perception was that of sunlight. It was morning, and the kine and fowls were astir.
He looked for the mysterious flower, but it was gone. He sprang from his bed and searched the room for it. "It did not exist," he sadly concluded. "It has returned to the mysterious world from whence it came."
For a long time afterward he suffered with a sense of loss, while the sunlight deepened in his room and the sounds of the barn-yard brought back to him the realization that he was in effect a fugitive in the house of a stranger. Slowly the normal action of his mind and body resumed its sway, and he dressed, quite sure that something abnormal had brought this vision to him. He wondered if he, too, were getting mediumistic. "Am I to be a son of my mother? Am I to hear voices and see visions?" he asked himself, with a note of alarm. He began to fear the disintegrating effects of these experiences. His personality; his body hitherto so solid, so stable, seemed about to develop disturbing capabilities.
He was profoundly pleased and reassured to find on his dressing-room table a large white rose, a rose precisely like that which had been laid upon his coverlet by the hand of the dream-woman. It's odor was the same, and its petals were as fresh as if it had just been cut. It reassured him by convincing him that his vision was real – that it had a basis of physical change; but it also started a perplexing chain of thought. "How came the rose here? Who brought it?" was his question. "It certainly was not there when I went to bed."
With the flower in his hand, he still stood looking down at the place where the hand of Altair had rested – still marveling at this mingling of the real and the fantastic, the dream and the rose, when something shining revealed itself half concealed by the pillow; and putting out his hand he took up a little brooch of turquoise set with diamonds, which he recognized instantly as one that Leo had worn at her throat when she said good-night.
Sinking into a chair, he stared now at the jewel, now at the rose, while a thrill of pride, of mastery, of joy stole through him. His blood warmed. His heart quickened its beat. Could it be that Leo had been his visitor? Was it possible that she, burning with hidden love of him, had stolen to his room, and there at his bedside, masking herself as Altair, had bent to his drowsy eyes, and laid upon his lips that fervid kiss? The thought confused him, overpowered him, exalted him.
His was a chivalrous nature, therefore this act, at the moment, seemed neither unmaidenly nor wrong – indeed, it appeared very beautiful in his eyes. It humbled him, made him wonder if he were worth the risk she had run? He was not abnormally self-appreciative, but he had not been left unaware of his appeal to women. His previous love-affairs had been those of the undergraduate, proceeding under the jocular supervision of his watchful fellows. His present case was in wholly different spirit. He was a man now – in fact, his quarrel with Leo from the first had been over her evident determination to treat him as a lad.
The memory of her serene self-possession made her self-surrender of the night all the more amazing to him. "It is cold and empty where I dwell," she had said. This meant that she loved him – longed for him – it could mean nothing else. Her love had begun during their ride on the lagoon, in their delicious drowse on the grass. It had been deepened by their afternoon of sweet companionship at tennis and over their books; then came the walk in the moonlight and her acceptance of his caress in the dusky place in the path – all were preparatory to this final wondrous visit and confession.
And yet her eyes had never been other than those of a friend. Seemingly she had laughed at herself for the momentary weakness of yielding to his arm. Her daylight expression had always been that of the humorous, self-reliant, rather intellectual girl, who acknowledges no fear of man and no sudden rush of passion, and yet – How reconcile the facts!
He smiled to think how he had been deceived by her imperious air, by her expressed contempt for his interest. "And all the while she was really waiting for me to break through her reserve," he said; and this delicious explanation satisfied him for a few moments, till he went deeper into his memory of what she had said and done.
He was forced to reassure himself again by the jewel and the rose that she had really come to him, so dream-like did the whole ethereal episode now seem. The more he dwelt upon the vision the deeper it moved him. It's growing significance set his blood aflame. In fiction and poesy women often sacrifice their reserve, moved by uncontrollable longing, like the heroine of mad Ophelia's song, because commanded by something stronger than their sweet selves. It was hard to think of Leo as one carried out of herself by love – and yet here lay the jewel of her bosom in his hand! How to meet her puzzled and excited him.
Up to this minute he had admired her and had paid court to her as a young man naturally addresses a handsome girl, but he was not violently in love with her; indeed, she had interested him rather less than a girl in Winona, daughter of Professor Boyden; but now, as he was about to meet her in the breakfast-room, she possessed more power, more significance, than any woman in the world. He recalled how fine and helpful she had been during the few days of their acquaintance – her serenity, her good sense, her pungent comment began to seem very wonderful.
He looked at himself in the glass, finding there a very good-looking, stalwart youth, but could not discover anything to account for the sudden blaze of Leonora's self-sacrificing passion. He was neither a fool nor a peacock, and he tried to account for her love on the ground of her regard for his mother. Then, like a flash of light, came the thought, "She was sleep-walking!"
He had read of the marvels of hypnotism and somnambulism. Perhaps in some strange way his mother's desire to have Leo love her son had sent the girl straight to his bedside. There was something uncanny in her speech and in her gestures – only in her kiss had she been solidly, warmly human.
And yet all this seemed so difficult to believe – and besides, if the girl came in her sleep, did it not prove her love quite as conclusively? It might be unconscious, but it was there.
With heart pounding mightily, and face set and stern, he left his room and began descending the stairway, uncertain still of the way in which he should meet her.
Happily he found no one in the dining-room but the maid, who said to him, "Mr. Bartol would like to see Mr. Ollnee in his study as soon as Mr. Ollnee has had his breakfast."
"Very well," he replied; "I will make short work of breakfast this morning."
As he sat thus awaiting Leo, his mind filled with the wonder of her self-surrender, he considered carefully in what way he should greet her. "She must not know that I know," he decided. "I will greet her as if I had not found the brooch, and I will leave it where she will happen upon it accidentally."