The silly world shrieks madly after Fact, Thinking, forsooth, to find therein the Truth; But we, my love, will leave our brains unracked, And glean our learning from these dreams of youth: Should any charge us with a childish act And bid us track out knowledge like a sleuth, We'll lightly laugh to scorn the wraiths of History, And, hand in hand, seek cert.i.tude in Mystery.

--_When the Halcyon Broods_.

The house of the occultist was one of a long row, all alike, which reminds the observer of an exercise in perspective, as one glances down the stretch of bal.u.s.traded piazzas. Amidon walked straight across the street from the hotel, and counted the flights of stairs up to the fourth floor. There was no elevator. The denizens of the place gave him a vague impression of being engaged in the fine arts. A glimpse of an interior hung with Navajo blankets, Pueblo pottery, Dakota beadwork, and barbaric arms; the sound of a soprano practising Marchesi exercises; an easel seen through an open door and flanked by a Grand Rapids folding-bed with a plaster bust atop; and a pervasive scent of cigarettes, accounted for, and may or may not have justified, the impression. On the fourth floor the scent shaded off toward sandalwood, the sounds toward silence, Bohemia toward Benares. He walked in twilight, on inch-deep nap, to a door on which glowed in soft, purple, self-emitted radiance, the words:

MADAME Le CLAIRE ENTER

The invitation was plain, and he opened the door. As he did so, the deep, mellow note of a gong filled the place with a gentle alarum. It was sound with noise eliminated, and matched, to the ear, the velvet of the carpet.

The room into which he looked was dark, save for light reflected from a marble ball set in a high recess in the ceiling. None of the lamps, whose rays illuminated the ball, could be seen, and the white globe itself was hung so high in the recess that none of its direct rays reached the corners of the apartment. A Persian rug lay in the center, and took the fullest light. There were no sharp edges of shadow, but instead there was a softly graduated penumbra, deepening into murk.

Straight across was a doorway with a portiere, beyond was another, and still farther, a third, all made visible in silhouette by the light in a fourth room, seen as at the end of a tunnel.

Across this gossamer-barred arch of light, a black figure was projected, and swelled as it neared in silent approach. It came through the last portiere, on into the circle of light, and stood, a turbaned negro, bowing low toward the visitor.

"Madame le Claire," said Amidon feebly, "may I speak with her?"

There was no reply, unless a respectful scrutiny might be taken for one. Then the dumb Sudanese, carrying with him the atmosphere of a Bedouin tent, disappeared, lingered, reappeared, and beckoned Amidon to follow. As they pa.s.sed the first portiere, that mellow and gentle gong-note welled softly again from some remote distance. At the second archway, it sounded nearer, if not louder. At the third, as Amidon stepped into the lighted room, it filled the air with a golden vibrancy. It was as if invisible ministers had gone before to announce him.

Amidon took one long look at the scene in the fourth room, and a great wave of unbelief rolled across his mind. Through this long day of shocks and surprises, he had reached that stage of amazedness where the evidential value of sensory impressions is destroyed. He covered his eyes with his hands, expecting that the phantasms before him might pa.s.s with vision, and that with vision's return might come the dear, familiar commonplaces of his commonplace life.

The room seemed to have no windows, and the roar of the New York street outside was gone, or faint as the hum of a hive. The walls were hung with fabrics of wool or silk, in dull greens and reds, and the floor was spread with rugs. With mouth redly ravening at him, and eyes emitting opalescent gleams, lay a great tiger-skin rug, upon which, on a kind of dais, sat a woman--a woman whose eyes sought his in a steady regard which flashed a thrill through his whole body as he gazed. For she seemed to emanate from the tiger-skin, as a b.u.t.terfly from the chrysalis.

[Ill.u.s.tration: She seemed to emanate from the tiger-skin, as a b.u.t.terfly from the chrysalis.]

Her dress was of some combination of black and yellow which carried upward the tones of the great rug. Her bare arms--long, and tapering to lithe wrists and hands--were clasped by dull-gold bracelets of twisted serpents. Over shapely shoulders, the flesh of which looked white and young, there was thrown a wrap like feathery snow, from under which drooped down over the girlish bosom a necklace that seemed of pearl. The face was fair, its pallor tinged with red at lips, and rose on cheeks. The eyes, luminous and steady, shone out through heavy dark lashes, from under brows of black, and seemed, at that first glance, of oriental darkness. A great ma.s.s of dark-brown hair encircled the rather small face, and even in his first look, he noted at the temples twin strands of golden-blond which, carried out like rays in the fluffy halo about her brow, reappeared in all the twistings and turnings of the involved pile which crowned the graceful head. The yellow-and-black of the tiger appeared thus, from head to foot. It was afterward that he found out something of the secret of the peculiar fascination in the great dark eyes. One of them was gray, with that greenish tinge which has been regarded as the token of genius. The other was of a mottled golden-brown, with lights like those in the tiger's eye. In both, in any but strong light, the velvet-black pupils spread out, and pushed the iris back to a thin margin; and thus they varied, from gray or brown, to that liquid night, which Amidon now saw in them, as he stepped within the doorway, and looked so long on her, as she sat like a model for the Queen of the Jungle, that under other circ.u.mstances the gaze would have seemed rude. Some sense of this, breaking through his bewilderment, made him bow.

"Madame le Claire?" said he.

"The same," said she. "How can I serve you, sir?"

The voice, a soft contralto, was the complement of the steady regard of the eyes. As she spoke, she rose and stepped toward him, down from the little dais to the rug. She rose, not with the effort which marks the act in most, but lightly, as a flower rises from the touch of a breeze.

She was tall and lithe, and all the curves of her figure were long and low--once more suggesting the soft strength of the tigress. But when speech parted the lips, the smile which overspread her face won him.

"How can I serve you, my friend?" she repeated.

"I am in great trouble," said he.

"Yes," she purred.

"I saw your sign," he went on. "And I want you to tell me where I have been since June, 1896--and who is Eugene Bra.s.sfield? Did I kill him--or only rob him? And who is Elizabeth?"

She had stepped close to him now, as if to catch the scent of some disturbing influence which might account for such incoherence; but Amidon's breath was innocent of taint.

"Yes!" said she, "I think we shall be able to tell you all. But, are you well?"

"I have had no breakfast," said he. "When I found that I had lost five years--I forgot. And--once--I fainted. I'm not quite--well, I'm afraid!"

Madame le Claire stepped to the wall and pushed a b.u.t.ton. The turbaned Sudanese reappeared at once.

"Aaron," said she, "tell Professor Blatherwick that Mr.--Mr.----"

"Amidon," said Florian hastily--"Amidon is my name."

"--Amidon will dine with us," Madame le Clair continued smoothly. "He has some very interesting things for us to look into. And have dinner served at once."

Aaron! and dinner! and Blatherwick! The delicious vulgarity of the names was sweet music. For be it remembered that Florian was a banker, and a man of position; and sandalwood, Sudanese, Bedouins and illusions were ill for the green wound of his mystery--which, in all conscience, was bad enough in and of itself! Some confidence in the realities of things returned to him, but he followed Madame le Claire like a faithful hound.

V

SUBLIMINAL ENGINEERING

Now, Red-Neck Johnson's right hand never knew his left hand's game; And most diverse were the meanings of the gestures of the same.

For, benedictions to send forth, his left hand seemed to strive, While his right hand rested lightly on his ready forty-five.

"Mr. Chairman and Committee," Mr. Johnson said, said he, "It is true, I'm tangled up some with this person's property; It is true that growin' out therefrom and therewith to arrive, Was some most egregious shootin' with this harmless forty-five: But list to my defense, and weep for my disease," said he; "I am double," half-sobbed Red-Neck, "in my personality!"

--_The Affliction of Red-Neck Johnson_.

Madame le Claire led Mr. Amidon to the next room, turned him over to Aaron (now wonderfully healed of his dumbness) with a gesture of dismissal; and he was ushered by the negro into a most modern-looking chamber, in which was a bra.s.s bedstead with a snowy counterpane.

"Dinner will be suhved in ten minutes, suh," said Aaron.

They were waiting for him in the little dining-room, when he was wafted through the door by Aaron's obsequious bow. The tigrine Le Claire advanced from a bay-window, bringing a slender man with stooped shoulders.

"Papa," she said, "this is Mr. Amidon, whom I have induced to dine with us; Mr. Amidon, Professor Blatherwick."

Professor Blatherwick was bent, and much bleached, faded and wrinkled.

His eyes seemed both enormous in size and sunk almost to his occiput, by reason of being seen through the thickest of gla.s.ses. His lank, grayish hair, of no particular color, but resembling autumnal roadside gra.s.ses, hung thinly from a high and asymmetrical head, and straggled dejectedly down into a wisp of beard on chin and lip--a beard which any absent-minded man might well be supposed to have failed to observe, and therefore to have neglected to shave. When Madame le Claire stopped in leading him forward, he halted, and feeling blindly forward into the air as if for Amidon's hand, though quite ten feet from him, he murmured:

"I am bleaced to meet you, sir."

"Evidently German," thought Amidon.

"I understandt," said the professor, opening the conversation, as Madame le Claire poured the tea, "that you haf hadt some interesding experiences in te realm of te supliminal."

Amidon's tension of mind, which had left him under the compulsion of the woman's mastery of him, returned at the professor's remark.

"I have been dead," said he, "since the twenty-seventh of June, 1896!"

Madame le Claire stared at him in unconcealed amazement. The professor calmly dipped toast in his tea.

"So!" said he. "Fife years. Goot! Dis case vill estaplish some important brinciples. Vill you be so kindt as to dell us te sairc.u.mstances?"

"Oh, papa!" broke in the lady. "You must wait until after dinner. I saw Mr. Amidon was weak and disturbed, and, I thought--hungry. So I asked him to stay."

"I have eaten nothing but this," said Mr. Amidon, "since June twenty-seventh, 1896----"

"So," said the professor calmly. "Dis vill brofe an important case."