Victor Ollnee's Discipline
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"Yes, they were a little like hers."
"But her mouth and chin were exactly like yours. Her hands were like yours. She held her head exactly as you do – and then she changed; sometimes my mother predominated in her, sometimes you were the stronger."
The girl was deeply affected by the significance of this analysis. "You imagined all that."
He pushed on. "I did not, and, furthermore, Altair never came till you sat with my mother. She never attained such power – so your aunt agrees – till I came into the circle. She represented my conception of my mother and you. I loved my mother, and I admired you – and out of my love and admiration Altair was created."
"That is absurd! If ever a spirit came from heaven, Altair was that one. Why, she was palpable! I've touched her hands."
He said, slowly: "She was beautiful, I confess, so beautiful that on that first night she made even you seem coarse and material."
"I felt your disdain," she thrust in, with sudden hurt.
"But that was only for the moment. I could see nothing but her face – so sad, so wistful. But let me ask you something. Did you, the night after our walk on the drive in the moonlight – did you dream of me?"
Her lip curled in a wondering smile. "What a question to ask of me!"
"But did you? Come now, be honest. I have a reason for asking – did you?"
"What is your reason for asking?"
"That night Altair came to my bedside."
Her eyes flashed and she rose to her feet. "You have an Oriental imagination."
"Don't go – hear me out. It was a beautiful experience."
"Apparently it was. To me your story is insulting."
He lost patience a little, and said bluntly: "You act as if I charged you with something. I say, 'Altair' came, and to me her visit was very significant and beautiful, because she testified to me that both you and my mother were thinking of me. It was, in fact, your united astral selves that paid that visit. Altair was your materialized friendship and my mother's love."
"What a fantastic notion!" she said; but she lingered, held by something new and masterful in his voice.
She added, with some humor: "Be kind enough to imagine that your mother's 'astral self' preponderated in that vision."
"I do, for when Altair stooped to kiss me – "
"Stop!" she cried out, sharply; "you go too far!"
"Leo!" he called, and his voice checked her as quickly as if he had caught her by the arm. "I am not joking; I am very serious. You must remember that I have lost both my mother and Altair – you alone remain – I can't afford to lose you. You are all I have now. Don't be angry with me."
She considered him with a return to pity. "Forgive me," she hurriedly retracted. "I am very sorry for you, and I don't want to seem unfriendly; but it is only a week since we met. What can you know of me in so short a time?"
"I loved you the moment you came into my mother's room."
"Nonsense. You hated me."
"I did not like the way you treated me; but I never hated you. I was afraid of you."
"If your mother can hear you say that, she is certainly smiling, for she knows you are not afraid of anybody. You're a very stiff-necked person."
"I know you have a right to laugh at me; but I believe our 'guides' have brought us together. I need you – now – and if I dared I'd ask you to wear this." He disclosed a ring in his hand.
She looked at it narrowly. "I know that ring; it was your mother's. She kept it in a little velvet box together with an old-fashioned locket."
"Yes, it is hers. It isn't very grand, compared with your own, but I wish you'd put it on and consider it my promissory note."
"Your promissory note!"
"Yes, I promise to buy it back with all the money you have lost through my mother's advice. Will you wear it for me?"
"Where do you expect to find so much money?"
"Right here, in this great city. Mr. Bartol is to take me into his office. He's like a father to me already; but I don't expect him to give me anything. I'm going to work, and I'm going to pay you back the money you have lost."
Extending her little finger, she took the ring daintily on its tip. "All that sounds very romantic; and yet young men do win wealth and fame right here – and why not you?"
"That's just it. I may be the future monopolizer of air-ships – " The maid, appearing at the moment, announced that a lady wished to see Mr. Ollnee.
"Did she give her name?"
"No, sir; but she said she was a relative, sir."
"Tell her I will see her in a moment."
As the maid left Leo rose.
"Don't go!" pleaded Victor. "My visitor can wait. You haven't said whether you will wear my ring or not. I don't know how long it may be before I can 'make good,' but it will help mightily to know that you are expecting me to do so."
She pondered, but her face was kindly and her voice very gentle as she said: "I don't want to seem unkind now in your hour of grief, but I can't wear the ring." His eyes filled with tears, and she added: "I'll keep it for you. The real question between us will have to be decided some time in the future – when we know each other better. You need not think of paying me. Go and see your relation. It may be a rich aunt come to adopt you."
"Couldn't you learn to love me?" he asked, poignantly.
"I might." She smiled. "I like you already." And she went away, leaving him with stronger will to dare and do.
XVI
CONCLUSION
As Victor entered the library he was met by a very pale, wide-eyed young woman in a picturesque black hat. Her voice was deep and full of dramatic fervor as she said:
"You are Victor Ollnee?"
"I am."
Her eyes, large and very dark, almost black, gazed at him appealingly, as she said: "Pardon me for a little deception. I am your relation only in a spiritual sense – I share your sorrow, and in other ways I am related to you. I was eager to see you, and I did not send in my name for the reason that it would have repelled you, and you might have refused to meet me."
Victor thought her a very singular and very theatric young person. Certainly she was under some strong stress of emotion which caused her lips to quiver and her voice to vibrate tensely. He knew her now. She was the girl he had confronted in the court-room, and he stared at her, uncertain of his footing. She seemed like some of the figures he had seen on the stage, vivid, swift of change, unreal, but her voice was vibrantly charming. He was sure she was the girl he had met on the street, and she had stood beside the man Aiken during their brief appearance in the court-room.
She approached a step or two, as if throwing herself on his mercy. "My name is Florence Aiken. I am a newspaper writer. I am the one who brought all this trouble to you. It was I who wrote that first article in the Star denouncing your mother."
He recoiled before her quite as dramatically as she could have wished. "You wrote that!" he exclaimed. "I thought a man did that job."
She could not help a slight expression of pride in her work. "It was mine, every word of it. I was terribly vindictive, I admit; but you must know I had some provocation. Let me tell you? Will you listen to me? Please do! I'm not so heartless as I seemed in that article, and I cannot rest till I have made my peace with you."
Her voice, her pale face, her intense eyes, and her tense contralto voice softened his resentment.
"I'll listen, but you can't expect me to forgive a thing like that."
"May I sit?"
"Certainly," he answered, but remained standing, as if to retain his guard.
"Don't condemn me altogether," she pleaded. "Wait till you know how much reason I had to hate the whole brood of clairvoyants, seers, and psychics. My dear old grandmother was an easy mark for the cheapest of them, and I, who paid for her nurse out of my own thin little purse, and waited upon her night and day, had a right to consider her small fortune my own. It wasn't much, but it was enough to pay the cost of a flat, and to see it all going to fakers and greasy palmists – well, it was too much. It made a crusader of me – and it would have made one of you. It was not a question of your mother – alone. I went to our managing editor at last, and told him my story. I made it clear to him that the city was full of these harpies who prey on poor old women like my grandmother. 'They ought to be driven out of town,' I said. 'Cut loose,' he said; and I did. My article on your mother was honest. I believed her to be simply another one of the same sort of impostors. I took her just like three or four others whose methods I knew, and I got my cousin, Frank Aiken, to bring suit against her. I thought she was a crook. I feel differently to-day. Since talking with Judge Bartol and Mr. Stinchfield (I handled both those assignments) I've changed my estimate of her. I have written a page article vindicating her. I've come to tell you that her death in that cage has changed the situation for me. I am convinced that she was sincere, and I want to humble myself before you, her son, and ask your forgiveness. I know you feel more like killing me, but here I am – I couldn't rest without letting you know that I need your pardon."
Her plea, swift, voiced in music, and illustrated by her pale face, glowing eyes, and sensitive lips, powerfully affected him. He towered over her in savage silence for a little while, then with effort he said: "I don't see how I can do anything to you, for I felt the same way – I mean I didn't believe in my mother's business."
She became radiant. "Didn't you?"
"No. Up to the very moment when that red lamp was lit I could not believe in her. I couldn't help doubting – even now I need the photographs to bolster up my belief."
The reportorial instinct awoke in her. "I wish I might see those photographs – to reassure myself, not for publication. May I see them?"
He did not observe that her desire for his pardon seemed suddenly to be met, even though he had not yet put it in words, and his mind was wholly on the question of the photographic tests as he slowly replied:
"They are very marvelous – especially those which came on the unexposed plates."
Her eyes widened in wonder. "What do you mean?"
"Mr. Stinchfield had several packages of plates opened ready to use in his cameras, but The Voices only let him make one flashlight. It seems as if they knew the experiment would end my mother's life, and yet on each of the unexposed plates are faces and forms, some of which Mr. Bartol 'recognized.'"
"Let me see them – please!" she pleaded, earnestly. "They will comfort me, too, for I am under conviction."
He took from his pocket a package of small photographs. "Here," he said, "are the three flashlights of my grandfather, Nelson Blodgett."
The young woman almost snatched them in her eager haste. "Oh, wonderful! What a document! The medium plainly in her cage – and this figure on the same plate."
"It is the most convincing picture in existence," he said, sadly, "but it cost me my mother."
She fixed a dreamy gaze upon him. "If this is a spirit – then your mother can return to you. Has she done so?"
He moved uneasily. "I have not asked her to do that. I don't care to be controlled or guided by spirits, not even by her spirit."
"Why?"
His voice was firm and assured as he replied: "Because I want to live and work out my career like other men. I don't want to see or hear any more of the 'astral plane' – " He checked himself. "It isn't natural for a man like me to be mixed up with all this spirit business, and I'm tired of it."
"I see what you mean. You want to work and woo and marry like other men. You're right; of course you're right. What have we who are young and vigorous to do with the dead, anyway? Unless all human life is a mistake, a foolish thing, it's our business to live it humanly." She held out her hand for the other pictures. "Let me see them all, please!"
He handed them to her. "There were three cameras," he explained, "hence these duplicates. These faces are likenesses of Mr. Bartol's wife and two children – and these plates, remember, were not exposed – they are of Altair, one of the guides."
She studied the shadowy forms with keen gaze. "One of the strange things about this 'spirit photograph' business is the resemblance they all bear to pictures – I mean, they all look as if they were photographs of framed portraits or drawings."
Again he betrayed restlessness. "Mr. Stinchfield noticed that."
"What is his explanation?"
"He does not think they come from spirits at all."
She urged him to unbosom himself. "You have a conviction? What is it?"
"His theory is that they are only mental images transferred by some unknown mental power to the plates."
"What about the figure of your grandsire?"
"His theory is that the figure was really the etheric self of my mother – shaped to the form like my grandsire by her own mind."
She stared at him. "And you accept that?"
"I don't know what else to believe. Yes, I accept that. I don't believe the dead have any right to talk and fool with the lives of the living the way I've been fooled with and side-tracked." His voice was full of fervor now. "I'm going to live my own life hereafter irrespective of the dead – responsible only to the living. I will not be disciplined by ghosts."
The girl laid the photographs down softly and looked at him with frank admiration. "You're a very extraordinary young man," she said, sagely.
"No, I'm not!" he protested. "I'm just a good average. A week ago my hottest ambition was to carry the Winona ball team to victory. If I had the money and the courage I'd go back there to-morrow and finish my course."
"What do you mean by courage?"
"Well, you know what I'd be loaded up with. To go back there now would be the devil and all. Your article broke my peaceful combination just a week ago last Sunday."
"But I have undone my work. I have vindicated your mother. You have a right to be proud of her. She was as real a martyr as ever went to the stake."
"I know, but I'll be a marked figure, all the same."
"You were a marked figure before. But consider all explanations have been made – wait till you read my article. Go back!" she insisted. "I wish you would." Her voice was rich with pleading. "It would make me happy. I feel horribly guilty – really I do. I'm only a grubbing reporter-person – I've had to earn my way and keep house for my grandmother besides; but I'd gladly share my salary to help you return to college. Please go back – it will relieve my mind of a big burden."
He took her hand in the spirit in which it was offered. "I am within a few days of graduation, but – "
"Please go back – for the sake of a poor little newspaper wretch who feels that she has indirectly spoiled your career." She pressed his hand fervidly. "Promise me this and you'll take a monstrous load off my shoulders."
She had the face, the temperament of the actress, and loved to experiment on the hearts of men; but she was deeply in earnest now. Bartol and Stinchfield had really changed her point of view as regards Mrs. Ollnee, and this "situation" appealed to her at the moment with irresistible power. Life was to her a drama, intense, never-ending, romantic, and at the moment she loved this splendid young man orphaned by her hand.
He could not resist her caressing voice, her appealing eyes, her sensitive lips, and he said, "I promise."
"Thank you," she said, and, dropping his hand, she lifted burning yet tearful eyes to his face. "You are very generous."
He went on, "I am sure you meant well."
"I don't want to rest under false imputations," she repeated. "I did not mean well. That first article was savage. I was angry. I struck blindly, but I struck to hurt."
"Well, all that is ended," he replied, sadly. "My mother is to be buried to-day."
She looked at him in silence for a moment. "I have one more request to make," she said, at last, and her voice was very soft and hesitating. "I'd like to look upon her face. I want to ask her forgiveness."
His heart melted at this plea, and he turned away to hide his tears. When he could speak he said: "She is very beautiful. I cannot believe even now that she is dead; but I have given my consent to have her taken to the cemetery. I will show her to you."
In silence she followed him up the stairway and into the cool, dark room where the coffin lay.
The windows were open at the bottom, and though the shades were drawn, the chamber was filled with soft light. The cries of the barn-yard and the twitter of birds outside seemed strangely softened as the two young people so singularly brought together approached the still form of the seeress and looked into her face serene with the infinite repose of death.
Victor, with choking throat and burning eyes, stood at the bier unable to utter a sound; but the girl, after a long glance, took a rose from her bosom, and, with a sigh, gently laid it on the still, small, white hands of the silent form.
"Accept my homage," she intoned, softly, "and if you can still see and hear, pardon me and forget my bitter words."
She stood a moment thereafter as if involuntarily listening, waiting, hoping – but the dead gave no sign.
THE END