Читать книгу Petticoat Loose - Rita - Страница 6

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The smoking-room of the Imperial was full of men when Max Lorrimer entered. The Cork races had drawn the usual betting and horsey crowd together, and mingled with them were such English and American tourists as generally benefit hotel-keepers, and uphold their respective nationalities with more or less discretion. The Bird of Freedom hovered over some half-dozen loud-voiced and loudly-dressed individuals who were drinking whisky, or concocting "cobblers" and "cocktails," and expressing disapproval of the Irish in the way they managed their scenery, and retarded progress, and generally kept things back from that plane of hurry, bustle and confusion so dear to the Transatlantic soul.

A strange-looking young man was lounging in negligent ease on one of the chairs. He had a colourless face, clean shaven and heavily moulded, deep, inscrutable eyes, and a mass of dark hair, unfashionably long. He was talking to Max Lorrimer's travelling companion, and they both looked up as he approached.

"Oh, so you've turned up at last?" said his friend. "Just talking about you. Let me introduce you to an old friend of mine; not seen him since we were at college. Raemore Clive—Mr. Lorrimer. We'd a bet about you, old man. You can just set us right. Clive, I must tell you, has adopted a strange profession, or rather the profession has adopted him. He's a professor of Palmistry, Clairvoyance and Occultism, unlicensed by Act of Parliament; isn't that it Clive? Well, he sort of sighted you, just by holding a letter of yours in his hand. He saw you walking along, under trees, beside a river (the Lea, of course), with a girl, young and beautiful, &c. I said it was impossible. You'd gone out to dine, and were no doubt driving home by the Blackrock-road in the prosaic guardianship of a jarvey. Now—who was right?"

A strange embarrassment showed itself for a moment in the frank face on which both the men's eyes were fixed. The odd green inscrutable orbs of Raemore Clive seemed to shoot out a curious spark, and then grow dull. Max felt compelled to answer.

"I was walking by the river," he said, reluctantly. "The jarvey never came for me and I took the Marina on my way."

"By Jove!" exclaimed his friend. "That's lost me a sovereign. What about the girl, though? I'd faith in your morality strong enough to back it. Don't say I've lost, that also!"

"I think there's no question of morality or the reverse—yet," said the strange, low voice, of the thought-reader. "Mr. Lorrimer's companion was one of accident, not of selection. Was it not so?"

Again that compelling glance forced reluctant admission.

"Yes, I met that girl who was with the photographic show, you know, Templeton—this morning, when we had our portraits taken by that singular female."

"Yes, by Jove, I do remember, she was a rare beauty, too. Well, you're in luck's way, Max, my boy. More than I am. Here's the sov., Clive—or shall we take it in champagne? A magnum between us, and you shall make our flesh creep and our hair emulate the fretful porcupine what time we listen to the tales you can unfold."

Raemore Clive smiled faintly.

"By all means," he said. "I have no call on my clairvoyant powers just now. I hope you are satisfied that I spoke truth?"

He handed back a letter as he spoke. It was folded in half. A few lines of writing and the signature were alone visible. Max Lorrimer saw they were his own.

"Do you mean to say that, just from looking at that, you were able to see my whereabouts?" he exclaimed, with wondering curiosity.

"I could have told a great deal more had I wished, or had it been necessary," answered Raemore Clive. "That is very little to do. But your friend here was very confident, and very sceptical. I only wished to convince him."

Under his full white lids he again shot one of those strange, inscrutable glances. Max Lorrimer felt suddenly cold and sick. A sense of uneasiness, of almost physical terror, came over him. He seated himself hurriedly. It was a relief when the waiter brought the wine and glasses and placed them on a table beside the young men. He drank off a glass of the foaming liquid and lit a cigarette. Raemore Clive did the same. Then he leant back against the chair; his eyelids drooped, only a faint gleam, like a thin line of light, shone through their half-closed barrier. It affected Max Lorrimer strangely. He felt as if he was watching a hidden flame playing behind some fragile fabric that at any moment might leap into a blaze. He tried to keep his gaze away, but time after time it was compelled to return, and be greeted by a mocking smile, that touched the full-curved lips of the thought-reader.

"Come, now," exclaimed Templeton, at last. "Unfold your tale of witchery and darkness. Tell me how you discovered you had this power. You seemed an ordinary boy enough at Charterhouse, if I remember right, and you were destined for a doctor, weren't you? At least your father wished it."

"Yes," said Raemore Clive, sending a faint spiral wreath of smoke upwards. "That is all true. My discovery of psychic faculties was quite unexpected. I shall not inflict on you the phrases that make our jargon of explanation. Sufficient to say that when with people, or talking to them, I became aware of things about them that were secret or apart from any confidence they gave. It was as if I looked through them and saw their real selves behind the curtain of their material existence. I grew interested. I went to a clairvoyant, a Frenchman, in Paris, and learnt of my power and how to exercise it. Palmistry is only an excuse for this faculty of second sight. Now, I have so perfected it that I find it quite an easy matter to tell people what I see about them: what has happened, or may happen, or will happen."

"Do you mean to say," exclaimed Max Lorrimer, "that you could tell me, or anyone here, what will occur, say, five, six, a dozen years hence?"

"Right to the end of your lives, if you wish," answered Raemore Clive coolly. "But I don't say I would do so. It might distress or hurt, or terrify you. Now, for instance, do you see that man over there? He is drinking some American abomination and talking as if it was his last chance on earth of using his tongue. Well, I can see this about him. He'll never reach America alive. The steamer he sails in is going down, with every soul on board."

"Good Heavens," cried Max in horror. "But why don't you tell him—warn him? This is terrible!"

"Did the dwellers on the earth believe in the coming of the Flood? Did the Jews believe in the birth of a Messiah? Does the world, this present-day world, believe that its vices and crimes are going to end in the terrors of a Last Judgment? No. People only believe what they wish to believe, and a warning that is founded on no basis of common sense is the last thing I would insult them by offering. I have no desire to see the inside of a lunatic asylum yet. Madness is the only excuse men offer for what soars a little beyond their earthbound comprehension."

Max drew a deep breath.

"It is wonderful," he said. "Wonderful. And yet it can't be a very pleasant power either?"

"It is not; believe me. When I am with certain people, the evil and the cross magnetism about them affect me as a vile stench, or loathsome sight, would affect a very sensitive nose or vision. I get positively ill. I try to switch off the current of my mental faculties and to put a dead wall, so to speak, between us. That is my only remedy. You look incredulous. Has anyone ever read your hand?"

"No."

"I can't offer to do so here, but come up to my room to-morrow morning, and I will give you a sitting, if you like. But even without that I can tell you something. You are easy to read. Beware of feelings, swiftly born, swift in results. Guard yourself against impulses that will lead to important consequences. When there seems least fear, then dread danger. There. Take it for what it is worth, and let us have some more champagne."

They filled their glasses, but a silence of constraint seemed to have fallen upon them. Max felt uncomfortable, and puzzled. He could not explain this man's power of divination in any satisfactory manner, yet he felt it was reliable, and an overwhelming curiosity seized him to know more. He looked at Raemore Clive's strange inscrutable face, and wondered how and whence came that faculty of clairvoyance.

The smoking-room was thinning rapidly. The noisy group of Americans had dispersed, and yawns and good-nights affected the air as one by one the tourists followed their example. Soon the three men were sole possessors of the room.

Raemore Clive began to talk. His voice was low and languid, but it held his listeners as a charm. He told them of things he had seen in the East—that land of mystery and magic—of strange legends, and dark histories, and perilous escapes, when curiosity had brought him too near to danger. Then he spoke of the magnetism of certain natures; of the curious attraction that draws some, of the equally curious antipathy that repels others, of the inexplicable power that rules by a wish, and commands by a look; of all the strange inner life that the soul keeps in a shrine of its own, that has nothing in common with the outer world.

Max Lorrimer listened with intense interest. Much that he heard had been felt by himself, yet never acknowledged. In the world one does not speak of such things. Only a part of ourselves is ever shown to those about us, even to those who think they know us best. And in some shamed, foolish way he had hidden the best part of himself always—the little touch of romance, the chivalrous belief in women, the vein of poetry and mysticism underlying his apparent light-heartedness.

But he felt that this stranger read all these, that no lock or bar was strong enough to close the door of his real self to that piercing gaze. It troubled and perplexed him. Yet the spell of a strange attraction held him powerless. He went to his room that night, impatient for the morrow, wondering what he would hear, what would be foretold.

* * * * * *

The hush and the quiet of the night was all about him, but he could not sleep. His brain seemed active and alert, as if it needed no rest.

An endless drama of many scenes unrolled itself to his memory. Events long past and half-forgotten grouped themselves together, and cause and effect and consequence rang up or dropped the curtain as the play progressed.

His eyes were closed, yet he saw; his ears were dulled, yet he heard. Astonished, perplexed, and pained, he gazed at the visions, heard unheeded warnings, sorrowed for painful results. And then it seemed to him as if he had lived through the like before. As if centuries and centuries had rolled over his head, and in different ways and under different aspects he had still held part in their dramas, and beheld from afar their results. Suddenly darkness overwhelmed him. He could see nothing more. And a voice stole to the ear of his soul and it whispered. "Wait—for the end is not yet—neither shall be. The Guide to the Future is the Guardian of the Past."