Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “I am not sure,” answered Dr. Boynton, in the same musing tone as before, “what our duty is in the premises. Suppose, Egeria,” he continued with spirit,—” suppose that this antagonistic influence were confined to a single person in a population of two hundred and fifty thousand souls; would it not be a striking proof of the vastness of the resistance already overcome by spiritistic science, and at the same time an — a — a — indication of responsibility in the matter which we ought not to shun?”

  “I don’t understand you, father,” said Egeria, fearfully.

  “I mean,” replied her father, “that it may be our duty to sink all personal feeling in this matter, and bend every energy to the conviction, the conversion, of the person who thus antagonizes us.”

  The girl stood aghast, and for a moment did not reply, but glanced at her father’s heated face and shining eyes in a sort of terror. Some instinct, perhaps, flashed upon her a fear against which the habit of her whole life rebelled, and kept her from directly opposing him. She subdued the tremor that ran through her, and answered, “You know that I think whatever you do, father. How — how” — She apparently wished to temporize, to catch at this thought and that; without uttering any, she stopped short.

  “How should I go about it?” radiantly demanded her father. “In the openest, the simplest manner possible, by submitting your — your gift to the test of opposing wills; by inviting this man to a public contest, in which, laying prejudice aside, he and I should enter the lists against each other in a fair struggle for supremacy. I am not afraid of the issue. In this view, he is no longer an enemy. He is a blind, opposing force of nature, which is simply to be overcome; he can no more have insulted or wronged me than the rock against which I strike in the dark, than the tempest that dashes its drops in my face. Poor, helpless, blameless obstacle! I am ashamed, Egeria, that I used harsh language to him; I am ashamed that I retorted from my vantage-ground the merely mechanical outrage which I suffered from him. My first business must be to — to — apologize; to seek him in a spirit of passive good feeling, and to invite him in a sentiment of the widest liberality to enter upon this rivalry to — to” — He bustled about the room, seeking his hat. “It is my duty, it is my right, it is my sacred privilege, to go to him without a moment’s delay, and withdraw every offensive expression that I may have used in the heat of — of — controversy; to solicit, upon whatever terms of personal humiliation he makes, his cooperation in this experiment; to conjure him by our common hopes of immortality” — Boynton had found that his hat was not in the room; he made a swift dash towards the door. Egeria flung herself against it, and, holding it fast, stretched out both her hands towards him.

  “Wait!”

  Her father suddenly arrested himself. “Egeria!”

  “What — w hat” — the girl panted tumultuously, — — “what — if I can’t submit to the test?”

  Boynton looked at her in stupefaction, as if this were a point that had not occurred to him; but she confronted him steadily. “You cannot refuse,” he began.

  “You have not considered this matter yet, father,” said the girl. “You have not taken time” —

  “Time, time!” retorted her father, with wild impatience. “There is no time! Eternity hems us in on all sides! It presses and invades at every point! The man may die; a wretched casualty — a falling timber on the street, a frightened horse, an open cellar-way — may snatch him from me before I can use him for the purpose to which Providence has appointed his being. And you talk of time! Come, my daughter, let me pass! You are not you, nor! I, in such a crisis as this.”

  The girl moved from the door, and cast her arms about his neck, as he quickly advanced. “Oh, father, father!” she cried, “what is it you mean to do?”

  “Why, I have told you, child,” he answered, putting up his hands to unclasp her arms.

  “Yes; but if I failed?” she implored, clinging the closer. “Remember that I have been sick, that I am still very weak, and wait, — wait a little.”

  Boynton’s mood changed instantly. “Ha!” he breathed, and continued in his tone of scientific investigation: “Are you sensible, Egeria, of any distinct loss of psychic force through the diminution of your physical strength?”

  “How can I tell, father? It is you who do it. I see, or seem to see, whatever you tell me. I have always done that. It began so long ago, when I was so little, that I can’t remember anything different. I want to please you; I want to help you; but I don’t know if I can, father. It has always come from my thinking that what you wished was perfectly wise and right.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Boynton, “that is of course a condition of the highest clairvoyant force, though I don’t remember to have heard it formulated before.”

  “And don’t you see, father,” said the girl, looking tenderly into his face, as if she would fain interpose her love between him and what she must say, “that if I lose this perfect confidence I lose my power to do what you want me to do?”

  Dr. Boynton was hurt through the shield of her affection. “Have I done anything to forfeit your trust in my purposes, Egeria? If I have, it is certainly time for me to despair.”

  “Oh, no, no, father! I trust you; I love you this moment more dearly than ever I did. But are you sure — are you sure that it will all come out as you think? Are you sure that we are taking the right way? We have been trying now a long while, and I can’t see that we’ve accomplished anything. Perhaps I’m not a medium, but only a dreamer, and dream what you tell me. I’m afraid sometimes it isn’t right. I was thinking about it just before you came in. What if there should be nothing in it all?”

  “How nothing in it?”

  “What if you were deceiving yourself? I can’t tell how much my wanting to please you makes me — Oh, I’m afraid — I’m afraid it’s all wrong.”

  “Egeria,” said Dr. Boynton, severely, “I have often explained to you my principle in regard to these matters. These are the first steps. It is necessary that we should take them. Other steps will advance from the world of spirits to meet them. I am convinced — I know — that in your last séance we had direct proof of this; and I will yet compel, I will extort from that lying villain the confession that he had no agency in the things he claims to have done.” Boynton had lost his compassionate sense of Ford as an irresponsible moral force, and as he walked up and down the floor he broke from time to time into expressions of vivid injuriousness. “Listen, Egeria: I respect your conscientious scruples, though they belong to a petty personal conscience that I hoped before this you had exchanged for the race-conscience that gives me perfect freedom to think and to act. I will set the matter before you, and you will see the logical sequence of my course. In the development of the phenomena which now agitate the world, mesmerism came first, and spiritism came second. I follow this providential order, and I begin with mesmerism. In this, the results are unquestioned in your case. You have been accustomed all your life to my controlling influence, my magnetic force, by which you have seen, heard, touched, tasted, spoken, whatever I willed. I knew this and you knew it. A thousand successful experiments attest its truth. Well, when we come to deal with disembodied life, we have to deal with it as I deal with you. We have to show this life how to approach us; to suggest, to intimate, to demonstrate, the ways and means of communication with us. The only perfectly ascertained fact of spiritistic science is the rap. This, with the innumerable exposures and explanations which expose and explain all the other phenomena, remains a mystery, insoluble, whatever we attribute it to. But as a method of commerce with the other life, it is nearly worthless, — slow, vague, uncertain. We must advance beyond it, or retire forever from the border of the invisible world. Now, then, you see the unbroken chain of my reasoning, and as an investigator I take my stand boldly upon the necessity of first doing ourselves what we wish the spirits to do. A feeble sense of right and wrong may call it deceit; a vulgar nihilism may call it trickery; but the results will justify us, — they have j
ustified us. What I wish to do now, Egeria, is to determine whether an opposing force of doubt, embodied in a powerful intellectual organism, such as this man’s undoubtedly is, can annul, can annihilate, the progress we have made. We cannot meet this force too soon; for if it is able to do this, we may have to retrace all our steps and begin de novo.”

  Egeria listened drearily to her father’s harangue, and at the pause he now made she looked hopelessly at his eager face, and did not reply, though he evidently expected some answer from her.

  “After all, Egeria,” he resumed impatiently, “you have no manner of responsibility, moral or otherwise, in the affair. You have simply to yield yourself, as heretofore, to my will, and leave me to take the consequences. I will meet them all. But I wish, my daughter, to satisfy your minutest scruple. If you were acting in that séance upon the theories which you have often heard me advance; if you were supplying to the invisible agencies we had called about us the model, the prototype, the example, needed for communication with us; and if when that man seized your hand — granting that it was he who did so — you were yourself consciously doing any of the things supposed to be done by the spirits” —

  “I tried to bring myself to it; but I couldn’t, father; I couldn’t!”

  “Then — then,” panted her father, in a tumult of rising excitement, “it was not you who did those things? It was not you” —

  “No, no!” desolately answered the girl. “From the moment the windows were darkened till my hand was seized, I did nothing but sit quietly in the centre of the circle and strike my palms together, as Mrs. Le Roy told me.”

  “Thank God!” shouted Dr. Boynton, in an indescribable exaltation. “I knew I could not be wrong; I knew that you had no part in those things. This is a glorious moment! This — this —— is worth toiling and suffering and enduring any fate for!” He caught his daughter in his arms and pressed her to his heart, kissing her fondly and caressing her hair. “Now, now, everything is clear before me.”

  “I am so glad, father,” Egeria began. “I was afraid you expected — that you would be disappointed — but indeed” —

  “No, no! You were right! Your psychical perceptions were better than my logic. They taught you where to forbear. Your conscience — I am humiliated beyond expression to have undervalued it as a factor of our investigation — has brought us this splendid triumph. Egeria, we stand upon the threshold of the temple; its penetralia lie open before us; we have defeated death!”

  The girl was perhaps too well used to the rhetorical ecstasies of her father to be either exalted or alarmed by them; and she now merely looked inquiringly at him.

  “Don’t you see, my dear,” he continued with unabated transport, in reply to her look, “that if you did not do these things they were the results of supernatural agencies? It is this fact, ascertained now past all peradventure, that makes my heart leap.”

  “Oh!” murmured Egeria, despairingly.

  “But I must not lose a moment, now. I must see this young man at once, and challenge him to the ordeal that will release you from his noxious influence. I hope that I shall be able to treat him in the right spirit, and with the tenderness due an erring mind; I shall do my best, and I have every reason to be magnanimous. But his pretense of having performed by trick what was unquestionably the work of spirits is a thing that he must not urge too far. Or, yes, let him do so! I shall seek nothing of him but his consent to this contest. It may be for the general good that his discomfiture should not only be complete, but publicly complete.”

  “Don’t go, father, — don’t go!” implored Egeria, for sole answer and comment upon all this. “Let him alone, and let us go away.”

  “Go away?” cried her father. “Never! I must overrule you in this, my child,” he continued caressingly. “I respect, I revere, your power; but it is out of regard for that power that I must combat your weaker mood. It demands of me, as it were, that I should ascertain all its conditions, and remove every obstacle to its exercise.”

  “Oh, I don’t know what you mean,” replied the girl, and broke into hopeless tears.

  “You will know, Egeria,” returned her father. Not only shall I be clear to you, but you will be clear to yourself, as never before. I have now a clue that leads to final results, — the personal conscience in you, the race-conscience in me. I will be with you again in a little while, Egeria. Don’t be troubled. Trust everything to me.”

  He made haste to get himself out of the room, and pausing in the hall on the ground-floor long enough to secure the hat of a visitor of Mrs. Le Roy (who was then in a trance for the recovery of lost property belonging to this gentleman) he issued from the door to which he had lately followed Ford in their common rage. The owner of the hat had a larger head than Boynton, who, as he pushed his way along the street, with his face eagerly working from the excitement of his mind, had an effect at once alarming and grotesque; the squalid little children of the street shrank from his approach in terror, and followed his going with derision.

  V.

  EGERIA had made a step after her father, as if to call him back, when he left the room, but she had turned again, and lain down upon her lounge without a word. It would have been useless to call him back; he could only have come to renew the scene that had passed between them, and the result would still have been the same.

  From her despair there was but one refuge. She could appeal for help now only to the source of her terrors. The fact, hemming her inexorably in, pressed upon her excited brain with a strange, benumbing stress, in which there was yet all possible keenness of pain. Presently, it seemed as if she shrieked out with a cry that rang through the house. In reality she had uttered a little scream in response to a knock at the door.

  “Oh, did I wake you?” asked the uncouth servant kindly, putting her head in.

  “Yes — no — I was not asleep,” answered Egeria, lifting her face from the pillow.

  “There’s a gentleman in the parlor wants to see your father; and I don’t know — well, I told him the doctor was out, but you was at home. Shall I say you’ll see him? He says you’ll do just as well.”

  Egeria sprang from her lounge, and flinging open a shutter began to arrange her hair. “Yes; please tell him I’ll come at once.” At that moment she had but one sense, — the consciousness that Ford had come, and that she should have the courage to speak to him, and beseech him not to consent to her father’s proposal. She did not know how or why she should have this courage, but all fear had left her. She hastily smoothed her hair and arranged her dress, and ran down the stairs into the parlor to encounter her enemy with such eagerness as a girl might show in hastening to greet her lover.

  It was Mr. Hatch who came forward to meet her, and who took her hand. “Didn’t expect to see me here, Miss Egeria? Well, I’m rather surprised myself. But I had to come back from Philadelphia, before I’d fairly got started on my grand rounds, and I thought I’d make one more attempt to say good-by to the doctor and you.”

  “I understood — I thought” — began Egeria, her voice shaken with her disappointment, “I thought it was — it was” — She stopped, and tears came into her eyes.

  “I’m sorry it isn’t, Miss Egeria,” said Hatch kindly. “I would be willing to be anybody else in the world that you wanted to see.”

  “Oh, I didn’t want to see them! I was afraid to see them, and I hoped they had come,” answered Egeria.

  Hatch smiled, but he looked at her compassionately, his head set scrutinizingly on one side, while she pressed her handkerchief to her eyes, and recovered herself in a sort of cold despair. “I want you to let me ask you what’s the matter, Miss Egeria,” he said, impulsively. “You won’t think I’m trying to pry into your trouble?”

  “Oh, no!”

  “Well, we all know what the doctor is: he’s as good as gold, and as simple as a child, but he hasn’t got the practical virtues, — or vices, whichever you choose to call ‘em. Now, you know, Miss Egeria, that I respect the doctor ra
ther more than I should my own father, if I had one: has the doctor run short of money?”

  “Oh, no, no! Not that I know of! It isn’t that at all,” Egeria hastened to say.

  “Well, that’s one point gained,” said Hatch. “I’m glad of it. You’ll excuse my asking?”

  “Yes, — oh, yes,” she answered.

  “Well, then, is it something that I can help you about? I don’t care to know what it is, but I do want to help you. If I can, without knowing, you needn’t tell me.”

  “You can’t help me. But there’s no reason why you shouldn’t know. You can’t help me against my father, can you?” she asked, putting the case, as women do, at worse than the worst, so as to have the comfort of finding the truth short of the extreme. “How can any one help me against him?” Then, as Hatch stood waiting with a somewhat hopeless and wholly puzzled face, “He doesn’t mean any harm,” she hurried on distractedly, “but if he does it, he will kill me. He has done it, and nothing can save me! He’s talking with him this moment, and planning it all out; and when they are ready I shall have to go out before the people, and try it, and fail.”

  “Is it some test of your power?” asked Hatch.

  “Yes,” answered the girl. “That man who was here the other night — that Mr. Ford, — father has gone to him to get him to make some public appointment, and try whether I can do the things he says I can’t do. He has been here. Father wants him to come and test it himself, and that’s what he’s gone to him for; and I know he will; and I can’t do anything when he’s by.”

  She said no more, and Hatch began to walk up and down the room. Presently he stopped before her. “Well, Miss Egeria, there’s only one way out of it. The way is to go and talk to that fellow, and get him not to keep his appointment with your father, if he’s made one.”

  “For me to go? I thought of that; and then” —

  “Oh, no,” said Hatch, with a smile. “I’ll do the going and talking. You make yourself easy about it. But after that, don’t you think we could get your father to give this thing up, and go home?”