"It is not!" she retorted, fiercely. "It is beautiful and honest and--sane, and I'm going there as often as they will let me--and I'm going to leave the Pratt house to-morrow! I will not stay there another day."

"There are others to be consulted about this," he grimly answered.

"You have tried playing truant before."

She was now in full tide of revolt. "I am going to leave that house if I fall dead in the streets. I am going if 'they' choke me black in the face."

He sneered. "I know where you are going!"

At this moment she hated him and everything he stood for, and her voice was hoa.r.s.e with her pa.s.sion. "I don't care what you say or what you do, I will not be hounded and driven around like a slave by you or Simeon Pratt any longer. I'm going to have a little life of my own if 'they' tear me in pieces for it."

This outburst, so much more intense than any which had preceded it, alarmed Clarke and appalled Mrs. Lambert, who took her daughter in her arm with soothing words and caresses. "There, there, dearie! Don't worry--don't excite yourself. Father will not insist on your doing anything that will be harmful. He will protect you."

The girl, sobbing in reaction, bowed to the maternal bosom, feeling once more her own helplessness, receiving no help from her mother's sympathy, which was merely superficial. Her only hope of release lay in the strong, bright, self-reliant, humorous people she had just left, those to whom her grandfather and his "band" were less than shadows. They alone could save her from the despairing madness which she felt creeping upon her like a beast in the night. Her nerves, strung to dangerous tension, gave away utterly, and Clarke, realizing this, ceased to chide, and the ride ended without another word.

Pratt, who had been waiting for hours with the angry impatience of senility, met them at the door, truculent as a terrier. "What time o'

night do you call this?" he asked, with insulting inflection.

Mrs. Lambert answered: "I'm very sorry, but we had a sitting, and it took longer--"

"A sitting!" He faced Viola. "What did you do that for? I told you I didn't want any sittings given unless I was present, and you promised not to give any."

"I did not!" she replied, lifting a tear-stained but imperious face to him.

"Well, Clarke did."

Clarke hastily interposed: "The 'chief control' asked for it--said he wanted to talk to some of those present."

"I don't care what the 'chief control' said--"

Viola, thoroughly roused, now faced him, pale and scornful. "What right have you to ask where I've been or what I've done? I am not your servant--nor one of your poor relatives. You seem to forget that. I will not be your guest another day! I'd leave this house this instant if I could. I came here against my wish, and I will not be insulted by you any longer. I wish I had never seen you." And with haughty step she started to pa.s.s him.

He put out a hand to stay her. "Hold on, now!"

With flashing eyes and a voice that smote him like a whip, she cried out, "Leave me alone, please!" He fell back against the wall, and she pa.s.sed on and up the stairway, leaving him leaning there in dismay, his jaw lax.

The mother hastily followed, and as the door closed behind them Viola turned with blazing eyes. "This is horrible--disgraceful! I hope you enjoy being treated like that! How can you endure it? How can you ask me to endure it? If Anthony Clarke possessed one shred of real manhood--But he hasn't. He's so selfishly bent on his own plans he's willing to let me suffer anything. I'm done with him, mother. You needn't try to find excuse for him. I don't see how I endured him so long. He must never touch me again."

"Don't do anything rash, child."

"Will you submit to more insult? You can stay on till you are ordered out of the house if you like, but I will not!"

"But you know they advise it."

The girl turned, a new tone in her voice. "There, now, mother, we come back to that again! I'm tired of hearing that. If they insist on our staying here I will be sure they are the voices of devils and not those they claim to be. I don't believe my father would ask me to stay in a house where the very servants sniff at us. I don't believe he would let Anthony make use of me in this way. Professor Serviss calls our faith a delusion, and to-night I almost hope he's right. I have lost the spirit of the martyr, and everything seems foolish to me."

Mrs. Lambert regarded her daughter with horror. "Child, some earth-bound spirit has surely taken possession of you."

"I hope it will stay till to-morrow--till I get out of this house,"

she replied, and went to her own room without a good-night kiss, leaving her mother hurt and dismayed.

A few moments later Clarke knocked at the sitting-room door. "Julia, here is a message I want you to give to Viola."

As she opened to him he faced her, pale and tremulous, all his anger, all his resolution gone. "She was unjust to me," he said, humbly; "take her this." He extended a folded leaf of paper in a hand that partook of the pallor of his face.

"You poor boy," she exclaimed, her heart wrung by his suffering, "you mustn't mind what she said--it was only a girlish pet."

"Mother," he cried, pa.s.sionately, "to lose her now would kill me. She is my hope, my stay, my G.o.d! She has stabbed me to the heart to-night.

Did she mean it? She can't mean it!"

She patted him on the shoulder. "Go to bed, laddie, it's only a mood.

She will be all sunshine to-morrow. It's only a reaction from a wearisome day--be patient and don't worry."

"She tortured me deliberately," he went on, wildly. "She let that man take her hand. She smiled at him in a way that set my brain on fire. I tried to be calm. I didn't intend to speak harshly, but I wanted to kill him when he said good-night to her. May G.o.d eternally d.a.m.n his soul if he tries to steal her from me!"

She recoiled from his fury. "Tony! What are you saying?"

"I mean it! Do you think I will submit to his treachery? I told him she was mine, and yet he took her hand--he leaned to her--he looked into her face." His eyes blazed with such wild light that the gentle woman shrank and shivered.

"Tony, you are letting your imagination run away with you. Go to bed this instant," she commanded, in a voice that trembled.

He went away at last, weeping, miserably maudlin, almost incoherent, and when she closed and locked the door upon him she dropped into a chair, and for the first time since her husband's death gave way to tears of bewilderment and despair.

XVI

THE HOUSE OF DISCORD

Surely Simeon's house that night was a place of tormenting and tumult--the meeting-place of spirits whose dispositions were to evil fully inclined, and of mortals whose natures were upon the edge of combat. Viola, in full revolt, would not even permit her mother to come to her. Clarke, in an agony of love and hate, paced his room or sat in dejected heap before his grate. Mrs. Lambert, realizing that something sorrowful was advancing upon her, lay awake a long time hoping her daughter would relent and steal in to kiss her good-night, but she did not, and at last the waters of sleep rolled in to submerge and carry away her cares.

Viola, made restless by her disgust of Pratt as well as by her loss of respect and confidence in Clarke, did not lose herself till nearly dawn. Her mind was at first busy with the past, filled with a procession of the many things he had done to enrich her life. She was troubled by the remembrance of the grave, sad courtesy of his intercourse in the days just following his wife's death. At that time his kindly supervision of her music and his suggestions for her reading had given him dignity and romantic charm. "He was nice then," she said to herself. "If only he had stopped there." When he fell at her feet in the attempt to rouse her pity he had been degraded in her eyes. His whole manner towards her became that of suppliant--beseeching the "guides" to sanction their ultimate union. She burned with shame as she thought of her tacit acquiescence in this arrangement. "You have no right to interfere with my--with such things," she now said to the invisible ones. "I do not love Anthony Clarke. I don't even respect him any longer."

He had, indeed, become almost as offensive to her as Pratt, and the picturesque, soulful presence which he affected was at the moment repugnant. In contrast to the young scientist he was mentally and morally sick, and the world which he inhabited (and which she shared with him) hopelessly askew. Of this she had a clear perception as her mind recalled and dwelt upon the taste, the comfort, the orderly cheer of the Serviss home.

"We never made the spirit-world so awful. Mamma did not take such an excited view of it all. What has produced this change in us? Tony has.

He has carried us out into a nasty world and he has set us among frauds and fanatics, and I will not suffer it any longer."

She did him an injustice, but she was at the same time right. Mrs.

Lambert, left to herself, would have kept a serene mind no matter what the manifestations might be. With her the world of spirit interpenetrated the world of every-day life, and the one was quite as natural as the other and of helpful, cheering effect. She had remained quite as normal in her ways of thought as when in Colorow, and aside from her dependence upon the spirit-world for guidance would not have seemed at any point to be akin to either fraud or fanatic.

At last the girl's restless mind, cleared of its anger, its doubts and its doles, came back to rest upon the handsome, humorous, refined face of young Dr. Serviss. She felt again the touch of his deft, strong hands, and heard again the tender cadence of his voice as he said: "I hope you are not in pain? We will release you very soon." She dwelt long upon the final scene at the table, when, with a jesting word on his lips, but with love in his eyes, he took her hand to remove the marks of her bonds; and the flush that came to her was not one of anger--it rose from the return of her joy of those few moments of sweet companionship.

How sane and strong and safe he was. "He does not believe in our faith, but he does not hate me. How Dr. Weissmann loves him! They are like father and son."

Thinking upon these people and their home, with their griefs, their easy, off-hand, penetrating comments, their laughter filling her ears, the girl grew drowsy with some foreknowledge of happier days to come, and fell asleep with a faint smile upon her lips.