XIV
THE ORDEAL
In truth, Victor had not kept his head – how could he when each day brought some new temptation, some unexpected danger, or an unforeseen barrier? Was ever such a week of trial and perplexity thrust upon a youth? And the worst of it lay in the fact that there were no signs of a release from these baffling foes. Love's distress now came to add to his bewilderment and alarm.
Leo did not appear at luncheon, and her absence gave him great uneasiness till Mrs. Joyce explained that she had only gone to town to fetch some needed clothing. He still carried the little breast-pin in his pocket, but it no longer seemed the gage of a lovely girl's affection. He began to admit that he might be mistaken, and that his dream-woman and the jewel had no necessary connection. "One of the servants may have dropped it there," he now admitted; "and yet how could that be? It was under my pillow when I woke, and I am sure it was not there when I went to sleep. Perhaps I am the one who walks in sleep. Can it be possible that I took it from her room?"
It was all very puzzling, but he no longer possessed the fatuous self-conceit necessary to charge Leo with such self-abandonment as the dream and the discovery of the brooch had at first seemed to indicate. He sat among his elders at table, silent and depressed, very far from the triumphant mood of the morning, and yet the stream of his admiration set toward the absent one with ever stronger current. The most important thing in all the world, at the moment, was the winning of her forgiving smile.
Bartol was equally distraught, and though he remained politely attentive to his guests, he was plainly absorbed by some inner problem, and left to Mrs. Joyce the burden of the conversation.
Mrs. Ollnee, listless and remote, glanced at her host occasionally in the manner of one who awaits an expected sign. To her son this attitude on her part was repellant, for he understood it to mean that she was neither mother nor guest, but an instrument. He wondered whether Bartol had not, by some overmastering power of the mind, already assumed control of her thoughts as well as of her actions; and he chafed under the pressure of his host's abstraction. "Oh, why can't she quit this business? She must stop it!" he furiously declared.
Altogether they made a serious and restrained company, and all felt the loss of Leo. As the meal progressed Mrs. Joyce tried to secure from Bartol some notion of what his plans were, and he gravely replied:
"None of you must know. No one shall enter my 'ghost-room' till I am ready for my tests. In fact, I think I shall send you all out for a drive this afternoon so that you may not even hear the tap of a hammer."
Victor protested that he ought to study, and to this Bartol replied: "Very well. Take a book with you, but go off the farm. I want to be able to say that not one of the persons most interested were on the place while my preparations were going on."
In truth, the man of law was not merely puzzled by the method of transmitting the messages; he had been profoundly affected by the words themselves. His wife and daughter had apparently spoken to him again, each in distinctive way, upon matters which no one but himself could recognize.
But it was not alone what he had himself seen and heard and felt. The reading to which he had set himself had opened a new world of science for him. He was amazed at the enormous amount of direct evidence gathered and presented by careful men. Chemists applying the methods of the retort, biologists working in their own laboratories, psychologists and medical experts experimenting as upon a clinical subject, presented the same or similar facts. In Austria, in Russia, in England, the results were identical. To his mind, accustomed to sift and relate evidence, the most convincing thing of all was the substantial agreement of each and all of these investigators. In a certain sense the sneer of the faithful was deserved. These men of X-ray penetration and electrical annunciators had succeeded only in paralleling the phenomena of the early days of the healer and the magician.
At its lowest terms – or, as some would say, at its highest terms – Mrs. Ollnee's power was related to a sort of transcendental physics. Her magic refilled the most ordinary block of wood or crumb of granite with all its ancient potency. It widened and deepened the physical universe inimitably. It discovered the human organism to be unspeakably subtle and complicate, and made of the soul a visible demonstrable entity. Unthinkably swift as are the vibrations of the radium ray, this substance called the brain is capable of receiving, recording, giving off still more intricate and marvelous motions. Of what avail to call it "material"?
At times he glimpsed (as through a narrow opening) unknown regions of space, not of three or four dimensions, but an infinite number of worlds within worlds interpenetrating, undying, yet forever changing. At such moments he perceived that the scientists of to-day were but children groping among the set scenery of a dark stage, their text-books like their Bibles, the records of the bewildered and stumbling myriads of the past.
"How absurd," he said, "to attempt to make the present conform with the past! The Hebrew scriptures, the Vedas, the Sagas of the North, are all useful as records of the aspirations of primitive men, but the real understanding of the universe is to be obtained now or in the future. The present contains all that the past has possessed and more. Men are less of the beast and more of the spirit. Their powers have intensified, grown psychic, compelling, revealing, and yet the mystery of the universe remains and must remain."
In such ways and others his mind ran as he read swiftly through the wondrous record of experiments made in Rome, in Naples, in Milan. He liked these Italians better than the greatest of the Englishmen for the reason that they uttered no apology to the Pope. They proceeded on the assumption that they were biologists, not priests. They had no care whether their discoveries harmonized with some man's Bible, or whether they did not. The question was simple: Could the human organism put forth from itself a supernumerary hand or arm? Could it project an etheric double of itself? Could it interpenetrate matter?
Along these lines he proposed (with Victor's aid) to study his psychic guest. He had lost sight of the fact that he was to be her defender in court – or if he remembered it, it was only as a secondary consideration. He had no faintest hope of directly proving the continued existence of his wife and children; but he could see that a demonstration of the power of the living body to project and maintain at a distance an etheric brain, a voice, made (by inference) a belief in immortality possible.
This belief, this possible life of the soul, had nothing to do with the systems of celestial cosmogony built up by the followers of Christ or Gautama, its world was not peopled with angels, gods, or devils; it was merely another and inter-fusing material region wherein the spirit of man could move, retaining at least a dim memory of the grosser material plane from which it fled. It was inconceivable, of course, when scrutinized directly; but he caught a glint of its wonders now and then, as if from the corner of his half-closed eye.
These physical marvels were kept very near to him, as he sat at his desk, by minute tappings on his penholder, on his chair-back, and by fairy chimes rung on the cut-glass decanter at his elbow. At times he felt the light touch of hands, and once, as he returned to his seat after a visit to the library, he found a sheet of strange parchment thrust under his book, and on this was written in exquisite old-fashioned script: "Thou hast thy comfort and thy instrument. Hold not thy hand." And it was signed "Aurelius."
This was all very startling; but he referred it to Mrs. Ollnee herself. To imagine it a direct message from the dead was beyond him.
At four o'clock the road-wagon brought from the station a small, alert, and business-like young fellow, accompanied by various boxes, parcels, and bags. Bartol met him at the door and took him at once to his study. Neither of them was seen again till dinner-time.
The servants were profoundly excited by all this, but were too well trained to betray their curiosity above stairs. They knew now who Mrs. Ollnee was, but they believed in their master's government and listened to the hammering in the study with impassive faces – while at their duties in the hall or dining-room – but permitted themselves endless conjecture in their own quarters. Marie alone took no part in these discussions, though she seemed more excited than any of the others.
Meanwhile, Victor watched and waited in a fever of anxiety for Leo's return. At five o'clock she came, but went directly to her room.
Marie met her tense with excitement. "Oh, Miss Leo, Master has asked me to sit in the circle to-night, and I'm scared."
"You mean Mr. Bartol has asked you?"
"Yes – Miss."
"Well, you should feel exalted, Marie. It will be a wonderful experience."
"I suppose so, Miss, but my hands are all cold and my stomach sick with thinking of it."
Leo laughed. "You're psychic, that's what's the matter with you."
"Oh, do you think so!"
"Let me take your hands." Marie gave them. Leo smiled. "Cold and wet! Yes, you are it! But don't let it interfere with dinner. I'm hungry as a bear. Cheer up. I'd give anything to be a psychic."
"I shall flunk it, Miss; I can't go through it, really."
"Nonsense! It will be good as a play."
Half an hour later the others came in, and Leo heard Victor's voice in the hall with a feeling of distaste. She had gone out to him during that moonlit walk, and was suffering now a natural revulsion. It had not been love; it had been (she admitted) only physical attraction, and the fault, the weakness, had been hers. His presuming upon her moment of compliance was of the nature of man. It had frightened her to discover such deeps within herself. "We are all animals at bottom," she charged, in the unnatural cynicism of youth.
Notwithstanding this mood, she clothed herself handsomely in a gown which lent beauty to the exceedingly dignified rôle she designed to play, and so costumed went to her aunt's room to hear the news.
Mrs. Joyce was lying down, and her voice sounded tired as she said: "We were ordered out of the house at three, and have been driving ever since. Alexander, so Marie says, has had strange men working all the afternoon on some contrivance in his study. Evidently he is going to be very scientific."
Leo exclaimed with delight. "Now we'll see if these faces and forms are real or not."
"Why, Leo! Do you doubt?"
"Yes, deep in my heart I do. I cannot quite free myself from the belief that in some way Lucy produces all these effects."
"Of course she transmits them. She's a medium."
"I don't mean it that way – and I don't mean that she cheats; but somehow I never feel as if anything real came to me direct."
Mrs. Joyce did not feel able to pursue this line of argument. "What's the matter between you and Victor?"
"Who told you anything was the matter?"
"I sensed it."
"Well, why didn't you sense the cause?"
"He's a nice boy; you mustn't ill-treat him, Leo."
"Your solicitude is misplaced; you should be concerned about me."
"You? Trust you to take care of yourself! I never knew a more self-sufficient young person. I am only waiting for some man to teach you your place."
This was a frequent subject of very plain though jocular allusion between them. "A man may – some time – but not a rowdy boy. How does Lucy take the promise of a test?"
"Very calmly. She is relying wholly on her 'band' to protect her. She feels the importance of the trial, and does not shrink from it."
The Miss Wood whom Victor met as he entered the dining-room that night was precisely the young lady he had first seen, a calm, smiling, superior person who looked down upon him with good-humored tolerance of his youth and sex, putting him into the position of the bad little boy who has promised not to do so again. She not merely loftily forgave him, she had apparently minimized the offense, and this hurt worst of all. "I'm sorry not to have been able to work to-day," she said; "but I really had to go to town."
This lofty, elderly sister air after her compliance to his arm eventually angered him. His awe, his gratitude of the morning were turned into the man's desire to be master. He set his jaws in sullen slant and bided his time. "You can't treat me in this way when we're alone," he said, beneath his breath.
Later he was hurt by her vivid interest in the young inventor, whom Bartol introduced as Stinchfield. He was a small man with a round, red face and laughing blue eyes, but he spoke with authority. His knowledge was amazing for its wide grasp, but especially for its precision. He guessed at nothing; he knew – or if he did not know he said so frankly. In the few short years of his professional career he had been associated with some of the greatest masters of matter. His acquaintances were all men of exact information and trained judgment, men who lived amid physical miracles and wrought epics in steel and stone.
Naturally he absorbed the attention of the table, for in answer to questions he touched upon his career, and his talk was absorbing. He had been a year at Panama. He had helped to survey the route for a vast Colorado irrigating tunnel, and in his spare moments had perfected a number of important inventions in automobile construction.
It was for all these reasons that Bartol had 'phoned him, urging him to come out and assist in the infinitely more important work of reducing to law the phenomena which sprang, apparently without rule or reason, from the trances of his latest and most interesting client. "Here is your chance to get a grip on the phenomena that have puzzled the world for centuries," he said.
When Mrs. Joyce asked Stinchfield if he knew anything about spirit phenomena, he replied, candidly:
"Not a thing, directly, Mrs. Joyce. Of course I have read a good deal, but I have never experimented. It is not easy to secure co-operation on the part of those gifted with these powers. The trouble seems to be they consider themselves in a sense priests, keepers of a faith, whereas I have the natural tendency to think of them in terms of physics."
Bartol, smiling, raised a hand. "I don't want the company drawn into controversy. Experts agree that argument defeats a psychic."
Mrs. Ollnee still wore the look of one who but half listens to what is said, and Mrs. Joyce slyly touched her hand with the tips of her fingers. "Do you want to go to your room?" she asked.
Mrs. Ollnee shook her head. "No, I am all right."
"We will have better results if we 'cut out' dessert," Mrs. Joyce explained to Bartol. "Over-eating has spoiled many a séance."
"Is it as physical as that?" exclaimed Stinchfield.
"I never eat when I am on a hard case," said Bartol.
Victor began to awaken to the crucial nature of the test which was about to be made of his mother's powers. This laughing young physicist was precisely the sort of man to put the screws severely on. It was all a problem in mechanics for him. Whether the psychic suffered or rejoiced in the operation did not concern him. "If she is deceiving us in any way he will discover it," the son forecasted, with a feeling of fear at his heart. "And yet how can I defend her?"
Bartol said to Mrs. Ollnee: "Would you mind dressing for the performance? I'd like you to go with Mrs. Joyce and Marie, and clothe yourself in all black if possible, so that I can say you came into my study not merely searched, but re-clothed."
She said, quite simply: "I have no objection at all. I am in your hands."
After the older women left the room Victor drew near to Leo with a low word. "Poor little mother! she is in the hands of the inquisition to-night."
Thrilling to the excitement of the hour, she forgot her resentful superior pose. "Isn't that little man magnificent? Why didn't you go in for civil engineering or chemistry?"
"Because no one had sense enough to advise me," he bitterly answered.
"Think where that funny little body has carried that head," she continued, still studying Stinchfield. "If he had only been given shoulders like yours – "
"I'm glad you like something about me."
"I was speaking of your body as a machine for carrying a brain around over the earth."
"You seem to think of me as having no brain."
"Oh, not quite so bad as that. You have a brain, but it's undeveloped."
"I'm growing up rapidly these days. Seems like I'd lived a year since our walk last night."
She colored a little. "Forget that and I'll forgive you."
"I can't forget that."
"Have you any idea what the tests are to be?" she asked, in an effort to change the subject.
"No, I'm outside of it all. I hope they won't scare my poor little mother out of her senses. Ought I to step in and stop it?"
"No, not unless The Voices say so. They welcome investigation – so they've always said. What I should insist on, if I were you, is plenty of time and a series of sittings."
She was speaking now in gracious mood, and he, eager to win from her a fuller expression of forgiveness, spoke again, bravely. "I hope you are not going to be angry with me?"
"Not at all," she replied, with disheartening, impersonal cordiality. "I was partly to blame. I forgot you were a hot-headed boy."
"Don't take that tone with me – I won't stand it!"
"How can you help it?" she answered, with a smile, and moved toward the end of the table where Bartol and Stinchfield still sat smoking and leisurely sipping their coffee.
The little engineer sprang up as she drew near, and stood like a soldier at attention as she said, "Are you in merciless mood to-night, Mr. Stinchfield?"
"Far from it," he responded. "I'm in a receptive mood. The fact that Mr. Bartol has found enough in this subject to wish to investigate predisposes me to open-mindedness."
"Suppose we go into the library," suggested Bartol, and they all followed him across the hall.
Leo walked with the engineer, leaving Victor in the rear, hurt and suffering sorely.
It was not so much her displayed interest in Stinchfield as her haughty disregard of himself that touched his self-esteem. Thereafter he sulked like the boy she declared him to be.
When his mother came in robed in black and looking the sad young widow he was on the verge of rebellion against the whole plan of action, but he kept silence while Bartol explained his design.
"It is customary for 'mediums' to have things their own way, but in this case Mrs. Ollnee has placed herself entirely in my hands. The tests will be made in my study." He turned the key and unlocked the door. "Mr. Stinchfield will enter first and see that the room is as we left it."
The engineer entered, and after a moment's survey called: "All is untouched. Come in."
Bartol led the way with Mrs. Ollnee, and when Victor, the last to enter, had paced slowly over the threshold Stinchfield locked the door and handed the key to his host. The inquisition was begun.
The most notable furnishing of the room was a battery of three cameras, so arranged that they could be operated instantaneously, and Mrs. Joyce asked, anxiously, "Has the band consented to this?"
"They have consented to a trial," answered Mrs. Ollnee, in a faint voice. She had grown very pale, and her hands were trembling. To Victor this seemed like the tremor of terror, and his heart was aching with pity.
On one side of the room a deep alcove lined with books had been turned into a dark-room by means of curtains, and before these draperies stood the inevitable wooden table, but beside it, inclosing a chair, was a conical cage of wire netting encircled by bands of copper.
Mrs. Joyce exclaimed, "You do not intend to cage her in that?"
"That is my intention," calmly replied Bartol.
"Have the controls consented?" asked Mrs. Joyce.
"Yes," answered Mrs. Ollnee.
Of the further intricacies of Stinchfield's preparation Victor had no hint, so artfully were they concealed; but he recognized in it all a kind of humorous skepticism (which the engineer radiated in spite of his manifest wish to appear respectful); and as his mother entered her little torture tent Victor said, "You needn't do this if you don't want to, mother."
"Your father commands it," she replied, submissively.
Stinchfield screwed the cage to the floor and made an attachment to a small wire which ran along the book-case to a dark corner. Victor was enough of the physicist to infer that his mother was now surrounded by an electric current.
Bartol explained: "We are to start in total darkness, and then we intend to try various degrees and colors of lights. Mrs. Ollnee, how will you have us sit?"
"I want Victor opposite me, with Leo at his right and Louise at his left. Mr. Stinchfield will then be able to operate his wires. You, Mr. Bartol, sit at Leo's right and nearest the cage." Her voice was now quite firm, and her manner decided. "All sit at the table for a time."
Stinchfield snapped out the lights, one by one, till only two, one red, the other green, struggled against the darkness. When these went out the room was perfectly black.
Bartol then said: "In the cabinet behind the medium is a self-registering column of mercury, a typewriter, and a switch, which will light a lamp which hangs in the ceiling above the cabinet, and which has no other connection. The psychic is inclosed in a mesh of steel wire too fine to permit the putting forth of a finger. If the lamp is lighted, the column of mercury lifted, or the typewriter keys depressed, it will be by some supra-normal power of the medium. There is also on a table just inside the curtains, with paper and pencils, a small tin trumpet, a bell, and a zither upon it. If possible, we wish to obtain a written message independent of Mrs. Ollnee."
"It is the unexpected that happens," remarked Mrs. Joyce. "Shall we clasp hands, Lucy?"
"Yes," answered Mrs. Ollnee.
Victor, reaching for Leo's hand, tingled with something not scientific, a current of something subtler than electricity which came from her palm. He thought he detected in her fingers a returning warmth of grasp.
"They are here," announced Mrs. Joyce, after some ten minutes of silence.
"Who are here?" asked Bartol.
"My band – and many others."
"How can you tell?"
"I hear them." A faint whisper soon distinguished itself, and Mrs. Joyce reported that Mr. Blodgett was speaking. "He says he realizes the importance of this test, and that he has summoned all the most powerful of the spirits within reach, and that they will do all they can. He says the wire cage is a new condition, but they will meet it. Be patient; the strain on Lucy is very great, but it cannot be avoided."
In the silence which followed this conversation Leo shuddered and clutched Victor's hand as if for protection. "The other world is opening. Don't you feel it?" She whispered. "I can hear the rustle of wings."
He, growing very tense himself, answered: "I feel only my mother's anxiety. Are you comfortable, mother?" he asked.
She did not reply, and Mrs. Joyce said, "She is asleep." And all became silent again.
"Hello!" exclaimed Stinchfield. "Who touched me?"
"No one in the circle," answered Mrs. Joyce, highly elated.
"I certainly felt a hand on my shoulder – there it comes again! Shall I flash my camera?"
"Not now!" came a clear, full whisper, apparently from the cabinet. "You would fail now. Wait."
"Who spoke?" asked Bartol.
As there was no reply, Mrs. Joyce asked, "Is it you, Mr. Blodgett?"
"No!" the whisper replied.
"Is it Watts?"
"Yes."
"It is Isaac Watts. Now it is his science against yours, Mr. Stinchfield."
Bartol fell into the mode at once. "We are glad to be so honored. Now Watts, I want – and I must have – incontestable proof of the psychic's abnormal power – nothing else can save her from State prison. Do you realize that?"
"We do."
"Very well, proceed."
"What would you call incontestable proof?"
"I should say a registered pressure on the key or the lighting of the lamp above the cabinet – "
A vivid red flash lit up the room. Stinchfield shouted, "The lamp – the lamp was lit!"
His excitement, to all but Bartol, was ludicrously high, and Mrs. Joyce openly chuckled. "What else do you want done, Mr. Science?"
"Writing independent of Mrs. Ollnee," replied Bartol.
After a long and painful silence the bell tinkled faintly, and as all listened breathlessly the zither began to play.
"Now who is doing that?" asked the engineer.
"Turn on the green light!" suggested the Voice.
Stinchfield lit the green lamp, and by its glow the psychic was seen in her cage reclining limply, her face ghostly white in the light. Bartol looked about the circle. Every hand was in view, and yet the zither continued to play its weird and wistful little tune. Leo and Mrs. Joyce took this as a matter of course, but the men sat in rigid amazement.
"Lights out!" whispered the Voice.
Stinchfield put out his lamp. "That is astounding," he said. "I cannot analyze that."
"Will you swear the psychic did not do it?" asked the Voice.
The engineer hesitated. "Yes," he finally said.
"Is this sufficient?" asked the unseen.
Bartol replied. "Sufficient for my argument; but I do not understand these physical effects, and the jury may demand other proof. It will be necessary for us to show that the messages which misled, as well as those which comforted, came from some power outside the psychic and beyond her control. I believe that, as in the case of Anna Rothe – condemned by a German court to a long term of imprisonment – the charge of imposture and swindling made against Mrs. Ollnee must lie, unless I can demonstrate that these messages come from her subconscious self in some occult way, or from personalities other than herself. In fact, the whole case against Mrs. Ollnee lies in the question – does she believe in The Voices as entities existing and acting outside herself – "
He interrupted himself to say: "Something is tapping my hand. It feels like the small tin horn."
"It is!" came the answer in such volume that it could be heard all over the room.
"Does this not prove the medium innocent of ventriloquism?"
"Stinchfield – what about this?" asked Bartol.
The engineer could only repeat: "I don't understand it. It is out of my range."
Again the red lamp above the cabinet flashed, and by its momentary glow the horn was seen floating high over the cage, in which the medium sat motionless and ghastly white.
"Shall I flashlight that?" asked Stinchfield again.
"No," answered the Voice. "The flashlight is very dangerous. We must use it only for the supreme thing. Be patient!"
There was no longer any spirit of jocularity in the room. Each one acknowledged the presence of something profoundly mysterious, something capable of transforming physical science from top to bottom, something so far-reaching in its effect on law and morals as to benumb the faculties of those who perceived it. It was in no sense a religious awe with Bartol; it was the humbleness which comes to the greatest minds as they confront the unknowable deeps of matter and of space.
The boy and girl forgot their names, their sex. They touched hands as two infinitely small insects might do in the impenetrable night of their world (their hates as unimportant as their loves). Only the bereaved wife and mother leaned forward with the believer's full faith in the heaven from which the beloved forms of her dead were about to issue.
Suddenly the curtains of the alcove opened, disclosing a narrow strip of some glowing white substance. It was not metal, and it was not drapery. It was something not classified in science, and Stinchfield stared at it with analytic eyes, talking under breath to Bartol. "It is not phosphorus, but like it. I wonder if it emits heat?"
Mrs. Joyce explained: "It is the half-opened door into the celestial plane. I saw a face looking out."
This light vanished as silently as it came, and the zither began to play again, and a multitude of fairy voices – like a splendid chorus heard far down a shining hall – sang exquisitely but sadly an unknown anthem. While still the men of law and science listened in stupefaction the voices died out, and the zither, still playing, rose in the air, and at the instant when it was sounding nearest the ceiling the red lamp above the cabinet was again lighted, and the instrument, played by two faintly perceived hands, continued floating in the air.
Silent, open-mouthed, staring, Stinchfield heard the zither descend to the table before him. Then he awoke. "I must photograph that!"
"Not yet," insisted the Voice. "Wait for a more important sign."
In Victor's mind a complete revulsion to faith had come. His heart went out in a rush of remorseful tenderness and awe. The last lingering doubt of his mother disappeared. Like a flash of lightning memory swept back over his past. All he had seen and heard of the "ghost-room" stood revealed in a pure white light. "It was all true – all of it. She has never deceived me or any one else; she is wonderful and pure as an angel!" Incredible as were the effects he had seen, and which he had rejected as unconscious trickery, not one of them was more destructive of the teaching of his books than this vision of the zither played high in the air by sad, sweet hands. He longed to clasp his mother to his bosom to ask her forgiveness, but his throat choked with an emotion he could not utter.
Bartol, with tense voice, said to Stinchfield: "We have succeeded in paralleling Crookes' experiment. With this alone I can save her."
The flash of radiance from the cabinet interrupted him, and a new voice – an imperative voice – called:
"Green light!"
Stinchfield turned his switch, and there in the glow of the lamp stood a tall female figure with pale, sweet, oval face and dark, mysterious eyes.
"It is Altair!" exclaimed Leo.
Victor shivered with awe and exalted admiration, for the eyes seemed to look straight at him. The room was filled with that familiar unaccountable odor, and a cold wind blew as before from the celestial visitant, with suggestions of limitless space and cold, white light.