A Book o' Nine Tales Part 17

"Oh, yes; I am coming. Do you know which way Mrs. Fruffles is? I really must go."

"She is in the other room."

"Well, good-bye, dear."

"Good-bye."

The two separate, each thinking how fast the other is growing old. Mrs.

Chumley Jones, feeling that she has now done her whole duty, does not even take the trouble any more to tell people that the winter is like a Roman one. She merely makes her way to the hostess.

"Good-bye," she says. "One always has such lovely times at your house, Mrs. Fruffles."

"Oh, it is so kind of you to say so, when your Fridays are so much pleasanter."

"It is so kind of you to say so, my dear Mrs. Fruffles; but I am sorry to say that I cannot agree with you."

"It is the weather partly," the hostess observes; "so many people have said to me this afternoon that it seems like a Roman winter."

"Yes, I was just thinking of that very thing. Well, good-bye, my dear.

Be sure and come in on Friday."

"Oh, I wouldn't miss it for anything."

"Good-bye."

"Good-bye."

And as far as Mrs. Chumley Jones is concerned, Mrs. Stephen Morgan Fruffles ceases to be "At Home."

Tale the Fourth.

JOHN VANTINE.

JOHN VANTINE.

The relation of so improbable a story as the following is to be justified only by its truth. The hero is a New York lawyer, sufficiently well known to render the mention of his name, were it allowable to give it, an ample guarantee for the entire trustworthiness of any statement he might make; and it is perhaps to be regretted that his invincible--albeit natural--dislike of publicity prevents the production of evidence which would at least establish the fact that his own belief in the appearances by which he was visited is complete and sincere.

Mr. Vantine, although a handsome and intellectual-looking man, is by no means a person whose appearance would in any way single him out as likely to be the hero of marvellous adventures. He is neither especially imaginative nor credulous. He is simply a clear-headed and shrewd business man, such as are nourished in the atmosphere of New York, of all places in the wide world, perhaps, the one least likely to nourish fancy or belief in the unseen. To see him going steadily about his affairs down town, it is hardly probable that any observer, however keen, would look on him as the probable object of remarkable hallucinations, or of experiences so far from the ordinary course of human life, as sure to be cla.s.sed as such by ninety-nine men out of a hundred.

Yet John Vantine, of whom most of his acquaintances would have said that he was a commonplace man of business, lived for years a double life, into which he did not venture to initiate even his wife, with whom he lived on terms of the warmest sympathy and closest confidence.

It was on the morning of his wedding-day that certain impressions, which in a vague shape had for years haunted him, first took form so definite that he could not but think of them as something having a tangibility of their own, different though it was from that of the ordinary things which surround common human life. He was married at the home of his bride, a pretty village in western Ma.s.sachusetts. There being no hotel of even decent comfort in the place, Vantine had pa.s.sed the night at the inn of a town half a dozen miles away, whence he drove over in the dewy June morning to the scene of his marriage.

As he pa.s.sed along between the fields starred with daisies, reflecting in blissful mood upon the beauty of the day and the happiness it brought to him, his horse came suddenly and without warning to a standstill.

John instinctively gathered up the reins to start the animal, when to his unspeakable amazement he perceived a man in an Eastern dress of great splendor standing beside the open carriage. His robes were of the richest stuffs, while jewels sparkled from every part of his attire. He was standing apparently upon a small rug, a circ.u.mstance which at the moment impressed Vantine more than his mysterious presence. The stranger saluted the young man with the most profound obeisances, and it was only after repeated genuflections that he spoke. When he did address Vantine, it was in a language of which the latter did not even know the name, although in some astonis.h.i.+ng way he still comprehended what was said.

"Great Master," the stranger greeted him, "will you receive an emba.s.sy to congratulate you on your nuptials?"

Of course I cannot pretend here or elsewhere to give the exact words in which my friend was addressed. It was some years before he confided the story to me, and although I have endeavored to set the words down exactly as he gave them, it must be borne in mind that he made no attempt at literal verbal accuracy.

That a young man who had been nourished amid the hard commonplaces of New York life should be astounded by an address of this sort was only natural. That Vantine did not lose his head altogether was probably due to certain vague and premonitory experiences which he never defined very clearly, alluding to them as "pa.s.sing fancies," "nebulous impressions,"

and by other phrases too general to convey exact meaning to my mind. On the present occasion, however, beyond a rather prolonged silence before he answered his interlocutor, he seems to have behaved much as might a man stopped on the street by an ordinary acquaintance. When he spoke, he simply and laconically answered "Yes;" and, as he did so, he swept with his eye the wide horizon which the nature of the country laid open to him, perceiving nowhere sign of anything unusual.

Scarcely, however, had the monosyllable left his lips when he saw upon the woodside an enormous oriental rug cover the greensward, and instantly upon it stood a numerous company, dressed in the most splendid robes, saluting, and uttering stately but most enthusiastic congratulations. In this, as in all other instances in which my friend has seen figures, the lower portions have appeared first.

John sat in dignified and very probably half-stupefied silence during this extraordinary scene, and suddenly, without warning, the whole pageant vanished into the limbo from which it had come. He was once more alone upon a country road, in the bright suns.h.i.+ne of a June forenoon. It was his wedding morning, and, the vision or whatever it might properly be called having vanished, there was obviously nothing to do but to drive on and be married,--a course of action which he carried out to the letter.

I have fancied, although it is a point upon which I am doubtful, that John made some beginning of a confidence to his bride during the honeymoon of this extraordinary occurrence, and that the levity with which she received his first suggestions prevented his going further in his disclosures. The reason is, however, of no great consequence, but at least the fact is that he did not tell her. He gave a good deal of thought to the matter, corresponded with the Psychical Society, of London, not relating his own experience, but endeavoring to learn of a parallel case. He had, too, some communication with the Theosophical Society, of London, and even with the parent society, of Madras; and he at one time contemplated making a confidant of Madame Blavatsky, concerning whom, at that time, the European papers were full of marvellous tales.

He does not seem, so far as I am able to gather from what he has told me, to have hit upon any theory which afforded him a clue to the mystery of his own case; and just as he had made up his mind that the whole was a mere optical delusion, he had a second visitation.

He was in a Fifth Avenue car on the elevated road, returning home at night. The car was compactly filled, but before him, as he sat facing the middle of the car, was an open s.p.a.ce, two or three feet square.

Looking up, as the train started after stopping at the Twenty-third street station, John saw standing before him the same oriental figure which had greeted him on his wedding day. The stranger's face beamed with joy, and he scarcely waited to finish his profound salutation before exclaiming, "It is a propitious hour, Great Master. The young prince is a pearl beyond price."

Vantine's first instinct was to look at his neighbors, to see whether they too beheld the apparition, if apparition it were. The man on his right was looking up from his newspaper with the air of one who had heard the strange words and wished to discover whence they came. The man on the left was gazing at Vantine with an expression of bewildered curiosity. John turned his eyes again to the spot where his strange visitor had been.

The place was vacant.

My friend, in relating this, blamed himself severely that he had allowed a natural diffidence to prevent his asking his neighbors whether they had seen the "Great Mogul," as he began facetiously to dub the phantom in his thoughts. "But," he added, "n.o.body likes to be taken for a raving idiot, even by a stranger. They certainly looked as if they had seen the figure, but I couldn't make up my mind to ask."

Reaching home, John found that his wife had been prematurely but safely delivered of a l.u.s.ty son. The messenger sent to his office had missed him, and at the time of the appearance in the car, he declares that he was not consciously even thinking of his wife's condition at all.

When he had time to collect his thoughts after this second visitation, Vantine came firmly to the resolution that if he were ever favored with a third sight of the "Great Mogul," he would at least endeavor to discover whether the phantom were appreciable by the sense of touch. He read much about "astral appearances," and a good many more things of the sort, of which my own knowledge is too limited to permit my writing at all. He formed a hundred theories, and he began to get somewhat confused, to use his own expression, in regard to his ident.i.ty. He was half convinced that by some mis-working of the law of re-incarnation, the spirit of some Eastern potentate had been put into his body.

"Or," said he, with a whimsicality which was evidently deeply tinctured with a serious feeling, "that I had got into somebody's else body. If I had known any possible way of stopping the thing, it wouldn't have been so bad; but to have the 'Great Mogul' pop up like a jack-in-a-box, without any warning, was taking me at a disadvantage that I think decidedly unfair."

Not to lengthen unnecessarily a simple story, the speculations and investigations of Vantine may be pa.s.sed over, and the narrative confined to the bare facts.

It was when John's boy was about two months old that the emba.s.sy which had greeted John upon his wedding morning, or one closely resembling it, put in an appearance in honor of the child's birth. The child and its mother were taking their first drive, and Vantine came home to luncheon rather earlier than usual, to find them out. He went into the library, but had scarcely closed the door behind him, when the whole gorgeous company of his wedding morning were before him, and so real did they seem to him that John entirely forgot his intention of grasping the "Great Mogul" by the arm, to convince himself of the reality of that personage. The company overflowed with congratulations, rather florid to my friend's occidentally trained taste, but doubtless poetical in the extreme from an oriental point of view. Vantine was afterward amused and a little surprised to remember how much as a matter of course he took the adulation offered him, and the ease with which he played the role of "Great Master."

But suddenly he became so thoroughly amazed that all power of speech or motion seemed to forsake him. In the arms of the "Great Mogul" he perceived his baby boy, or an image that seemed to be the child, and to the babe the brilliant company were kneeling and swearing fealty. The whole ceremony occupied about half an hour, at the end of which time Vantine found himself once more alone, and upon going downstairs he met his wife and the nurse with the baby returning from their drive.

"He's slept like a dormouse," Mrs. Vantine said, in answer to her husband's inquiry. "I tried to rouse him once, but he wouldn't wake. I was half frightened, but he seems all right now."

As they entered the parlor the maid came to inquire if Mr. Vantine had brought company to luncheon, as she had heard voices in the library,--a circ.u.mstance which proved that the sound of the voices of his ghostly visitors was audible to other ears than his own.

John vainly wished that the baby, healthy, awake and cooing now, could tell whether dreams or strange experiences had troubled its sleep while its father had seen its image; but that is a point upon which he has never received enlightenment.

It was one winter night when the baby was six months old that the "Great Mogul" presented himself again. My friend had been taking a bath, and was dressing for bed when the figure of his visions appeared, and with every mark of terror and consternation prostrated itself at his feet.

"Great Master," it gasped in the usual formula, "pardon your slave's intrusion. The enemy are upon us. They--"