"Because it was only a jocular remark. I didn't intend you should know it. I don't know how I came to let it slip from my mouth. He has never returned, strange to say. I feel mother, but never Hayward."

They had reached a very tender and solemn pause--so self-revealing had been the woman's admission--and Britt was looking at his plate as his hostess began again with a.s.sumed brightness. "Well, now, about this girl. Can you take me to see her? She interests me beyond anything."

"Certainly. I should be delighted. But your brother knows her--she would be pleased to see you both, I've no doubt."

"My brother thinks she is a fraud, and does not wish to see her--"

"I derive my knowledge from you, Dr. Britt."

Britt was undisturbed. "I think she is a fraud, too, but a very charming one."

"That ought to make her all the more convincing," said Kate.

"And all the more dangerous," replied Britt. "She baffles me--when face to face with her."

"What are they going to do with her--exhibit her to the public?"

"Not for the present. Clarke has been making notes industriously all the year and is about ready to publish. He now wants a few of the big fellows, like Uncle Simeon Pratt, to help boom his book. The Lamberts are not in this for money--please give them credit for that--and as for the mother, she is entirely honest--she believes implicitly in her spirits."

"That puts the girl in a horrible position--if she _is_ deceiving,"

Morton interposed. "Imagine her state of mind if she realizes that her own mother has come to rest upon her system of deceit. The thought is horrible."

"It is quite as bad at that," returned Britt. "You see, the mother has been for years in close daily communion--as she supposes--with her husband, her little son, and others of her dead. Half of her daily life is in these joys, the other half in her daughter. There stood the wall that stopped me. I couldn't express my doubt to the mother. I couldn't apply the clamps. I simply withdrew. I do not intend to pursue the matter to a finish so long as the mother is alive."

Morton's face was clouded with pain. "Let us drop the Lamberts as a subject; they are too distressing, especially as I see no way of helping them. When do you return?"

Kate acquiesced in her brother's diversion of the stream of talk, but an hour later, as Britt was about to go, she seized the opportunity to say: "You must not fail to take me to see this girl. I have never been so excited about any one in my life. Can't you take me to-morrow?"

"I am entirely at your service. Suppose I call at four--will that do?"

"Perfectly. I'm very grateful to you."

"I hope you won't come to curse me for it. I warn you, the girl is d.a.m.nably convincing. She may enamour you."

"No fear of that," she cried, in defiant brightness. "I'm not so easily fooled."

She re-entered the library with the flush of an excited conviction in her face. "Morton, I feel as if I had taken part in the dissection of a human soul."

He threw up his hand with a gesture of pain and despair. "Don't! I can only hope that girl is utterly bad. Otherwise she is the sport of devils. Help me forget the whole uncanny business."

"You're wrong," she said, firmly. "It is just such men as you and Dr.

Weissmann who should s.n.a.t.c.h the pearl of truth from this bucket of mental mire."

"That's a very good phrase, Kate--if only I was sure of the pearl."

There really was no way out for him. His mind utterly discredited the phenomena Viola claimed to produce, and that left but one other interpretation. She was a trickster and auto-hypnotist--uncanny as the fabled women who were fair on one side but utterly foul and corrupt on the other. In his musing her splendid, glowing, physical self drew near, and when he looked into her sweet, clear eyes his brain reeled with doubt of his doubt. If there were any honest eyes in the world, she was innocent, and a tortured victim, as Kate had so quickly decided; and his plain duty was to beat back the forces seeking to devour her.

"The mind is an obscure kingdom subject to inexplicable revolts and sudden confusions," he thought. "Delusions are easy to foment, and at the last are indistinguishable from the fact, so far as the mind which gave them being is concerned. The body of this girl is young, but her brain may be cankered by the sins and lies of a long line of decadent ancestry." The thought was horrible, but it was less revolting than the alternative--in no other way could her life be explained and excused. In any case it was highly courageous in her to put marriage away as decisively as if it were a crime. And this she must have done, for even Clarke, according to Britt, had thus far sued in vain. There was a heroic strain in the girl somewhere. Was it too late to rescue her from the mental gangrene eating its way to the very centre of her soul? This was the question which only a renewed acquaintance, a careful study could resolve.

IV

THE PATRON OF PSYCHICS

Up to the hour of his wife's death Simeon Pratt had been but the business-man, large of appet.i.te, pitiless, self-sufficient, and self-absorbed--the type of man often described by amiable critics as "a hard citizen, but good to his family, you know," as if the fact of his not beating his wife were adequate excuse for railway wrecking.

He might be seen taking the 7.49 train at Eighty-sixth Street each week-day morning with a bundle of newspapers under his arm, a man of depending jowls and protuberant belly, who never offered any one a seat and did not expect such courtesy from others. He was burly and selfish as a hog, and was often so designated by work-weary women, whom he forced to stand while he read his market reports in callous absorption.

His a.s.sociates greeted him with a nod, unsmiling and curt, and the elevator-boys at the Pratt building were careful not to elbow him. He had the greed of a wolf and the temper of an aging bear, and yet his business ability admittedly commanded respect. Everything he did had a certain sweep. He was not penurious or mean in his wars. On the contrary, he despised the small revenges; but in a strife with his equals he was inexorable--he pushed his adversaries to the last ditch, and into it, remorseless as a mountain land-slide.

All the tenderness in his nature, all his faith in goodness and virtue, he reserved for his home. To his wife (a woman of simple tastes and native refinement) and to his children, bright and buxom girls of twenty-odd, he was a fond and gruffly indulgent provider, making little protest over new gowns and parties. He had no sons, and this was a hidden sorrow to him, and had the effect of centring all his paternal pride and care in his daughters. He could deny them nothing when they wheedled him, and they were nearly always humorously and brazenly trying to "work him," as he called it. Only in one particular had he been granite. With means to build on the east side of the Park, he had deliberately chosen the Riverside Drive in order to show his contempt for the social climbers of upper Fifth Avenue, and neither smiles nor tears had availed to change his plan.

His house was a dignified structure exteriorly, but within was dominated by his taste rather than by that of his daughters, who were quite unable to change his habits after they were once set. He refused to consider their suggestions as to furniture. The interior was, as Britt had said, not unlike a very ornately formal French hotel, and this resemblance arose from the fact that he had once enjoyed a pleasant stay in a house of this sort; and when the decorator submitted a number of "schemes," he chose the one which made the pleasantest impression on his mind.

With three women at the table, he habitually took charge of the dinner, controlling the menu and the decorations as well. It amused outsiders to see him in wordy consultation with the head-waiter and the butler while his guest of honor vainly tried to continue some story he had begun, but his wife suffered in silence. In short, Simeon proceeded precisely as he would have done at a restaurant or at his club, and his family stood clear of his elbow, the girls with sly shrugs of their rounded shoulders, the wife meekly, but ineffectually, protesting against his usurpation of her domain.

He was not politically ambitious, and was in a fair way to grow old as one of the obscure millionaires of New York City when death reached a sable hand and smote him full in the front of his pride and a.s.surance--his wife and daughters were lost in the sinking of a boat off the coast of France.

The news of this disaster came to him as he sat at his desk--the morning papers had given no hint of it. "I don't believe it," he said, quietly, and began pressing the b.u.t.tons of his desk with the same swift calmness he would have used had the markets been going against him. Messages flew to and fro, the wires pulsed with his imperious anxiety. The manager of the steamboat company answered--denied. The news was confirmed, all to the same end; and when Simeon Pratt rose from his desk that night his jaw hung lax, his big form stooped and shambled as though twenty additional years had suddenly been heaped upon his shoulders. He went back to his splendid, lonely palace (where the servants huddled and whispered and hastened) with a hard, dry knot in his throat, and with eyes heavy and hot and tearless confronted his ruined altar. From one to be feared he had fallen in a day to the most desolate of beings.

Messengers pursued him. The bodies were recovered. He gave orders for them to be shipped by the first boat. In the blaze of the electric light, with horrid, staring eyes and stiffly moving lips, he cursed himself and G.o.d. He cursed himself for letting his treasures go from him, he cursed G.o.d for permitting such outrages upon justice. At last he fell silent, but he did not sleep nor eat till the end of the second day. Then he rose, took the 7.49 train as usual, and returned to his desk--unshaved, with creased and crumpled clothing, a gray and battered man, sustained by habit, seeking relief in work.

His a.s.sociates, with forced cheerfulness, professed pleasure at his return, carefully avoiding mention of his appalling loss. To those who did speak of it he returned no word or glance. With fumbling, thick, and nerveless fingers he took up the purple-lettered ribbon of his trade. He fixed his dim eyes on market reports and dictated notes and orders, but it was a poor show. Even those who hated him as a gross, unlovely character were shocked at his shrunken form, his grayed and grizzled cheek. When death deals a blow like that the defeated one acquires a certain majesty.

Gradually the old man regained ability to compute and combine, and to converse with his partners concerning the affairs of the house; but his keen interest, his prompt decision of utterance, were all gone.

His presence in the office was the result of habit merely. In reality he was waiting the return of the steamer which bore his precious clay.

This boat was delayed by storms, and for three days the broken financier, unable to remain in his office, walked to and fro between Broad Street and Bowling Green, haunting the office of the steamship company until the bloodless manager, nervous and irritated, left his chair to avoid him, unable to endure the sight of his haggard face and piteous eyes.

When the boat arrived, Simeon met it with his own yacht, and, with a return of his iron resolution, stood by to protect the graves of his hopes as they slid across the rail. Then, ordering every soul from the cabin, he sat down beside the caskets. He _knew_ that his loved ones were there, and yet he could not realize it. He was filled with a desire to prove it all a mistake, but the fear--the certainty of the disfigured faces--deterred him.

He took them home. Nothing could have been more piercingly pathetic than that flabby, gray old man, sitting alone amid the tawdry splendor of his drawing-room with the remains of all he loved in this world shut away from him by rosewood and silver. When the last pale and shaking servant had left the room, the father gave one long, hoa.r.s.e, choking wail, and fell upon his face on the floor, crushed and utterly despairing.

When he rose he was calmer. He began to give orders for a sumptuous funeral, taking charge of every detail in his familiar way. The ceremony was magnificent and profoundly affecting. Every one present in the great church shed tears of heartfelt sorrow, pitying the great banker, quite humanly; but he himself did not weep, he sat limply with eyes on the floor, in a daze of internal emotion; but when the door of the vault closed on his dead a final terrible cry burst from him, the cry of one who realizes to the last and to the full the emptiness, the futility of a life without love, an old age without hope.

His interest in the material world, in the war of trade, was gone. His vast wealth would still bring him dividends, and his clerks and partners would still consult him, still demand his signatures, but the ones who made all these matters worth doing had vanished.

Life seemed utterly useless, a vain effort, but while yet he struggled with the fear of death and a hate of the day, a delegation of those who claim to hold communion with the dead came to him with a greeting from his wife. This message contained words which startled him. He was persuaded to seek confirmation. He was convinced and became the most fervent of spiritualists. His form lifted, his eyes brightened. A new world opened for him. He announced his intention to use his vast wealth for the faith which had comforted him. He built a magnificent temple to the unseen. He hired speakers and musicians to entertain and instruct those who came to hear. He sought out and entertained scores of mediums, psychics, sensitives, inspiritual speakers, and natural healers--all were welcome at his hearth. He might have been called, and was called, "the prey of harpies," but, as his interests now were in these matters, and as he had the means wherewithal to amuse himself, surely he was not a loser. True, he was many times deceived by false prophets and wronged by fraudulent seers, but still he enjoyed the exquisite solace which the voice of his wife unfailingly brought when the conditions were favorable. He was no longer hopeless; on the contrary, he was reanimated, made over in the faith of the spirit-world. The daughters came less often to speak to him, but when they did come they made his dark, cold heart glow with their gay words. At times it seemed that he could reach out his hands and touch their soft cheeks, so palpable were they, so intimate and familiar were their voices.

Gradually a part of his old-time business shrewdness came to his aid in these intangible matters, and he began to distinguish and to cast out the base and parasitic prestidigitators who infested his house. He grew discerning, and was able to weed the tares from the wheat, and with this discernment came the conviction that it was his duty to violently expose those who sought to cheat him. He became a terror to the fraudulent, and by his vigorous denouncement of this and that performer raised storms of opposition; for it seemed that no trickster, no matter how base, was without a following. His purposes clarified. Aided by cunning counsel, he began to conceive of himself as one called to a great mission; and, resigned to his lot, he set himself to the work of furthering in every possible way the reign of the spirit-world.

It was into the hands of this shattered yet still powerful man that Viola Lambert had been persuaded to deliver herself, and Simeon, convinced of her powers by experiment, and charmed by her girlish grace and dignity, had pushed all other keepers of the door of silence from his house, thereby arousing a tempest of denunciation; for these sibyls gave up the luxury of his table, the munificence of his purse, only after persuasion, and in bitterness and wrath.

Viola's meeting with Pratt was brought about by Clarke, who was aware through the special organs of the faith that the great merchant and promoter was not merely insatiable in his thirst for new sources of solace, but exceedingly generous with his comforters. No sooner had he secured the girl's consent to go than he wrote to Pratt asking him to meet them in Boston. Receiving no answer (Pratt was afflicted with such letters), he wrote again, detailing the experiments he had made, laying great stress upon the fact that the psychic was the daughter of a well-to-do Western mine-owner, that she was a cultured young girl, and that her mother (a distinguished evangel in the cause) was devoted even to the point of submitting her daughter to a series of absolutely convincing tests. He made mention also of his book, which was nearly ready for the press, and which he hoped would create a great stir among scientists.

Simeon did not answer this letter, but sent a representative to Colorow to investigate the writer's claims. The detective returned to say that "the parties" had gone to Boston, but that they had a fine reputation in the region, and that the father was a rich and well-considered citizen. "No one knows anything out o' the way with the girl," the spy added.