Vera, the Medium Part 7

"I see--a court room," said the girl. "It is very mean and bare. It is somewhere up the State; in a small town. Outside, there are trees, and the sun is s.h.i.+ning, and people are walking in a public park. Inside, in the prisoner's dock, there is a girl. She has been arrested--for theft.

She has pleaded guilty! And I see--that she has been very ill--that she is faint from shame--and fear--and lack of food. And there is a young lawyer. He is defending her; he is asking the judge to be merciful, because this is her first offence, because she stole the cloak to get money to take her where she had been promised work. Because this is his first case."

Winthrop gave a gasp of disbelief.

"You don't mean to tell me--" he cried.

"Hus.h.!.+" commanded the girl. "And he persuades the judge to let her go,"

she continued quickly, her voice shaking, "and he and the girl walk out of the court house together. And he talks to her kindly, and gives her money to pay her way to the people who have promised her work."

Vera dropped her arm, and stepping back, faced Winthrop. Through her tears her eyes were flas.h.i.+ng proudly, gratefully; the feeling that shook her made her voice vibrate. The girl seemed proud of her tears, proud of her debt of grat.i.tude.

"And I've never forgotten you," she said, her voice eager and trembling, "and what you did for me. And I've watched you come to this city, and fight it, and fight it, until you made them put you where you are." She stopped to control her voice, and smiled at him. "And that's why I knew you were District Attorney," she said; "and please--" she fumbled in the mesh purse at her waist and taking a bill from it, threw it upon the table. "And please, there's the money I owe you, and--and--I thank you--and goodbye." She turned and almost ran from him toward the door to the hall.

"Stop!" cried Winthrop.

Poised for flight, the girl halted, and looked back.

"When can I see you again?" said the man. The tone made it less a question than a command.

In a manner as determined as his own, the girl shook her head.

"No!" she said.

"I must!" returned the man.

Again the girl shook her head, definitely, finally.

"It won't help you in your work," she pleaded, "to come to see me."

"I must!" repeated Winthrop simply.

The eyes of the girl met his, appealingly, defiantly.

"You'll be sorry," said the girl.

Winthrop laughed an eager, boyish laugh. When he spoke the tenseness in his voice had gone. His tone was confident, bantering.

"Then I will not come to see you," he said.

Uncertain, puzzled, Vera looked at him in distress. She thought he was mocking her.

"No?" she questioned.

"I'll come to see Vera, the medium," he explained.

Vera frowned, and then, in happy embarra.s.sment, smiled wistfully.

"Oh, well," she stammered; "of course, if you're coming to consult me professionally--my hours are from four to six."

"I'll be there," cried the District Attorney.

Vera leaned forward eagerly.

"What day will you come?" she demanded.

"What day!" exclaimed the young man indignantly. "Why, this day!"

Vera gave a guilty, frightened laugh.

"Oh, will you?" she exclaimed delightedly. She clasped her fingers in a gesture of dismay. "Oh, I hope you won't be sorry!" she cried.

For some moments the District Attorney of New York stood looking at the door through which she had disappeared.

Part II

The home of the Vances was in Thirty-fifth Street, nearly opposite the Garrick Theatre. It was one of a row of old-fas.h.i.+oned brick houses with high steps. As the seeker after truth entered the front hall, he saw before him the stairs to the second story; on his right, the folding doors of the "front parlor," and at the far end of the hall, a single door that led to what was, in the old days, before this row of houses had been converted into offices, the family dining room. To Vera the Vances had given the use of this room as a "reception parlor." The visitor first entered the room on his right, from it pa.s.sed through another pair of folding doors to the reception parlor, and then, when his audience was at an end, departed by the single door to the hall, and so, to the street.

The reception parlor bore but little likeness to a cave of mystery.

There were no shaded lights, no stuffed alligator, no Indian draperies, no black cat. On a table, in the centre, under a heavy and hideous chandelier with bronze gas jets, was a green velvet cus.h.i.+on. On this nestled an innocent ball of crystal. Beside it lay the ivory knitting needle with which Vera pointed out, in the hand of the visitor, those lines that showed he would be twice married, was of an ambitious temperament, and would make a success upon the stage. In a corner stood a wooden cabinet that resembled a sentry box on wheels. It was from this, on certain evenings, before a select circle of spiritualists, that Vera projected the ghosts of the departed. Hanging inside the cabinet was a silver-gilt crown and a cloak of black velvet, lined with purple silk and covered in gold thread with signs of the zodiac.

Save that these stage properties ill.u.s.trated the taste of Mabel Vance, the room was of no interest. It held a rubber plant, a red velvet rocking chair, across the back of which Mrs. Vance had draped a Neapolitan scarf; an upright piano, upon which Emmanuel Day, or, as he was known to the cross-roads of Broadway and Forty-second street, "Mannie" Day, provoked the most marvelous rag-time, an enlarged photograph in crayon, of Professor Vance, in a frock coat and lawn tie, a china bull dog, coquettishly decorated with a blue bow, and, on the mantel piece, two tall beer steins and a hand telephone. From the long windows one obtained a view of the iron shutters of the new department store in Thirty-fourth Street, and of a garden, just large enough to contain a sumach tree, a refrigerator, and the packing-case in which the piano had arrived.

After leaving Winthrop, without waiting for Vance, Vera had returned directly to the house in Thirty-fifth Street, and locked herself in her room. And although "Mannie" Day had already ushered two visitors into the front room, Vera had not yet come downstairs. In consequence, Mabel Vance was in possession of the reception parlor.

Mrs. Vance was plump, pink-and-blonde, credulous and vulgar, but at all times of the utmost good humor. Her admiration for Vera was equaled only by her awe of her. On this particular afternoon, although it already was after five o'clock, Mrs. Vance still wore a short dressing sack, open at the throat, and heavy with somewhat soiled lace. But her blonde hair was freshly "marcelled," and her nails pink and s.h.i.+ning. In the absence of Vera, she was making a surrept.i.tious and guilty use of the telephone.

From the fact that in her left hand she held the morning telegraph open at the "previous performances" of the horses, and that the page had been cruelly lacerated by a hat pin, it was fair to suppose that whoever was at the other end of the wire, was tempting her with the closing odds at the races.

In her speculations, she was interrupted by "Mannie" Day, who entered softy through the door from the hall.

"Mannie" Day was a youth of twenty-four. It was his heart's desire to be a "Broadwayard." He wanted to know all of those, and to be known only by those, who moved between the giant pillars that New York threw into the sky to mark her progress North.

He knew the soiled White Way as the oldest inhabitant knows the single street of the village. He knew it from the Rathskellers underground, to the roof gardens in the sky; in his firmament the stars were the electric advertis.e.m.e.nts over Long Acre Square, his mother earth was asphalt, the breath of his nostrils gasolene, the telegraph was his Bible. His grief was that no one in the Tenderloin would take him seriously; would believe him wicked, wise, predatory. They might love him, they might laugh with him, they might clamor for his company, in no flat that could boast a piano, was he not, on his entrance, greeted with a shout; but the real Knights of the Highway treated him always as the questioning, wide-eyed child. In spite of his after-midnight pallor, in spite of his honorable scars of dissipation, it was his misfortune to be cursed with a smile that was a perpetual plea of "not guilty."

"What can you expect?" an outspoken friend, who made a living as a wireless wire tapper, had once pointed out to him. "That smile of yours could open a safe. It could make a show girl give up money! It's an alibi for everything from overspeeding to murder."

Mannie, as he listened, flushed with mortification. From that moment he determined that his life should be devoted to giving the lie to that smile, to that outward and visible sign of kindness, good will, and innate innocence. As yet, he had not succeeded.

He interrupted Mabel at the telephone to inquire the whereabouts of Vera. "There's two girls in there, now," he said, "waiting to have their fortunes doped."

"Let'em wait!" exclaimed Mabel. "Vera's upstairs dressing." In her eyes was the baleful glare of the plunger. "What was that you give me in the third race?"

At the first touch of the ruling pa.s.sion, what interest Mannie may have felt for the impatient visitors vanished. "Not in the third," he corrected briskly. "Keene entry win the third."

Mabel appealed breathlessly to the telephone. "What price the Keene entry in the third?" She turned to Mannie with reproachful eyes. "Even money!" she complained.