The Tyranny of the Dark Part 12

"Oh, they don't go quite so far as that. The circles are 'very select.' Only the priests of the faith and their friends are invited--no admission fee--you understand?"

"I'm glad of that. It would be too bad to put that child forward in the double role of fakir and money-breeder; but, tell me, have you any fresh light on the subject of her mediums.h.i.+p?"

"Well, yes. I've changed my point of view slightly. I'm inclined to think there is pretty generally some basis for the faith. The literature of the subject is immense, and some of it is as well authenticated as any physical treatise. I'm convinced that Miss Lambert has no intent to deceive--she has no possible motive to do so--but Clarke has, and yet I cannot connect him directly with the phenomena."

"How is her health?"

"Very good, apparently. She is quite as blooming as when you saw her, and is immensely more mature mentally."

"Is she resigned to her life?"

"Sometimes she is and sometimes not. She is very sensitive to influences, and at times when Clarke is near she grows almost as enthusiastic as he--at other times she bitterly complains. I tried to free her from Clarke, but she wouldn't give me the authority necessary."

"What do you mean by that?"

There was something both sad and mocking in Britt's face as he answered: "I offered to marry her--wasn't that generous of me? She spurned my humble offer, intimating that there was small choice between me and Clarke and the spooks. No, I'll be honest, she was very nice and kind about it, and added that perhaps Mr. Clarke was right--her duty in the world was to 'convince people of the reality of the forces,' or something like that. 'I shall never marry,' she added, to soften the blow, and really she does seem a person set apart."

Serviss looked down at his book. "I suppose she imagines herself stricken with a mortal illness. I confess I sometimes think of her in that way. I can't understand why her parents--" He checked himself.

"Where are they stopping?"

"They're housed over near the Riverside Drive with a wild enthusiast who has oodles and wads of money--old Simeon Pratt."

"I've heard of Simeon--Uncle Simeon the reporters call him on 'the Street.' I remember now about his spiritualism. He had some remarkable experiences after his wife's death--drowned, wasn't she?"

"You can't afford to be indefinite about Simeon's sorrows, doctor, for they made him what he is. I find these believers all start in about the same way. Simeon's wife and two daughters were lost in the English Channel. Simeon became a believer the following Monday--or maybe it was Tuesday."

"I recall the story of his life now. It was all very tragic. I wonder he didn't become a maniac."

"Some people think he did," answered Britt, dryly.

"So they're with Simeon. He lives gorgeously, I'm told."

"About like a lone American guest in a twenty-franc-per-day hotel in Paris. Why, yes, they're very comfortable there--all but the girl.

She's discontented and unhappy, if I'm any judge, and is besieged day and night by the mourning faithful, not to speak of certain amorous males."

This hurt, and Serviss s.h.i.+fted ground. "Does she keep up her music?"

Again Britt smiled, but not humorously. "She plays the harp--in the dark."

"You mean--"

"She's taken on a lot more of the regulation tricks--materializing flowers, slate-writing, music without hands, etc."

"You don't mean it! I can hardly a.s.sociate such doings with her,"

sorrow and indignation mingled in his voice.

"I a.s.sure you I was there last night at a 'circle,' and these things took place with Clarke as ring-master. There wasn't a particle of originality--it was the same old mill, and the same old grist, yet I don't hold her responsible in any harmful degree. I can't believe she designedly tricks, but she's surrounded now by a gang of chattering, soft-pated women, and men with bats in their belfry, who unite in a.s.suring her that her G.o.d-given powers must be fostered. They've cut her off from any decent marriage--she's virtually a prisoner to their whims. What they may induce her to do next I don't know. I'm going to hang round here for a week or two and see." A violent fit of coughing interrupted him. When he recovered he looked up sidewise. "Isn't this a peach of a climate? Wouldn't you think they'd build at least one of their big cities where microbes couldn't fatten on genius?"

"What led Clarke to consent to leaving the West? When I was there he bitterly opposed her going."

"Oh, it's very simple. He has written a book on _The Physical Proof of Immortality_, and, being anxious for a publisher, withdrew his opposition to her plan, and declared himself willing to go to Boston--at Lambert's expense."

"Is he out of the Church?"

"Absolutely. You should have heard his farewell sermon. It really was as dramatic a speech as I ever heard. He went on to declare that the Hebrews were not the only seers, that the wells of inspiration were not yet dry, that revelation was waiting upon every soul to-day, and that he had been led by sorrow to listen at the key-hole, and so on. I trembled for the girl's secret, but he had himself in hand, and did not betray her. No one out there knows for certain what her abnormalities are."

"How about Lambert? Why didn't he take a hand?"

"He seemed bewildered by it all, and overawed by Clarke and the girl's 'controls.' 'It's all above timber-line for me,' he said, but he didn't like their coming away a little bit. He was angry with Clarke for breaking up his home, and if the girl had been his own I think he would have stopped the business long ago. Then there was a young fellow, Clinton Ward, who was working for Lambert, a fine young fellow--"

"I remember him."

"Well, it seems that his father is a partner in a publis.h.i.+ng firm in Boston, and Clarke tried to make use of him to get his book published, and I believe his firm is to take it. Meanwhile the young fellow is in love with Viola, and willing to marry her and take chances, but his family is very properly aghast. Viola, knowing this--or for some other reason--refuses him. And there you are! The girl seems cursed on all sides, and, worst of all, has to endure Clarke and his ravings twelve hours of every mortal day."

"What is her relation to Clarke?" asked Serviss, hesitatingly.

"Well, now, I don't know. Sometimes I think he controls her by some infernal hypnotic power; and then again, from some phrase of her own, I think she considers her mind diseased, and marriage with any one else impossible."

"I don't see how the mother can stand by and see her daughter's life burned away."

"She, in her turn, seems enslaved to the dead. She has often told me that her father's spirit is leading her every movement."

"That particular ghost is Clarke--don't you think?"

Britt's eyes narrowed. "I don't know. I have never been able to connect him directly with a single one of these manifestations, and yet he must be at the bottom of part of it."

"It all comes back, then, to the girl herself."

Britt rose uneasily. "I repeat I am completely at sea. I have studied every line of old Randall's notes till I'm 'dopy' myself. Everything has conspired to make the girl hysterical--to fasten some accursed mental weakness upon her. If I could have stopped it two years ago she might have outgrown it. Every year now makes it less easy for her to shake it off--whatever it is."

"Atrocious!" exclaimed Serviss. "Has no one authority to act?"

Britt shrugged his shoulders. "What would you do when both parents--the living and the dead--consent? Only a husband could intervene, and Clarke seems to be about to claim that place. No, I see no hope for the girl. She may be right, after all, in joining Clarke."

Serviss rose to release the emotional tension under which he had kept his limbs. "You don't know their present plans?"

"No, only that Clarke is going to publish soon." He looked round the room. "What a development since my time! Bacteriology and auto-transportation are neck and neck in their amazing expansion."

Thereupon they dropped all reference to the Lamberts and their trials, and turned their minds upon phagocytes and other ravening mites whose likes and dislikes, minute as they are, work more devastation than cannon.

Serviss's work was over for that day; after Britt went away he sat idly at his desk, his mind busy with the revolting pictures called up by what he had heard of Viola. "They are destroying a beautiful soul,"

he exclaimed, bitterly, as he recalled the charm of her face and voice on that ride to the mine. "They are forcing a charming girl into an abominable life, they are warping her moral fibre into ugliness and death--and Clarke is the fanatic devil of the scheme."

The desire to see her, to talk with her, to measure the change in her grew very strong--so strong that he meditated a call, but the thought of Clarke cut the resolution off before it was fully formed.

"Probably Britt is right--Clarke's rotten soul has fatally infected hers."

When Weissmann came in Serviss turned to him and said: "Doctor, I want to ask you a very unusual question."

"Proceed," replied the old man, who spoke with a little touch of the German now and then.