Читать книгу The Undiscovered Country - William Dean Howells - Страница 7

DR. BOYNTON watched Ford out of sight, and then, hot and flushed, turned back into the house. He did not return to the parlor, where the stormy scene had taken place between them, but went to his daughter's room. Egeria lay there in the twilight that befriended the shabbiness of the chamber, upon a lounge wheeled away from the wall, and at his entrance she asked, without lifting her eyes to his face (for women need not look at those dear to them to know their moods), "What is it, father?"

"Nothing, nothing," panted her father, with a poor show of evasion.

"Yes, there is something," sadly persisted the girl. "Something has happened to worry you."

" Yes, you are right!" cried Dr. Boynton with vehemence. "I have just met the grossest outrage and contumely from a man whom—whom— But, Egeria," he broke off, "tell me how you knew I was troubled. Did you hear angry talking?"

"No, I didn't hear anything. Who was the man, father?"

"Did you notice anything in my manner?"

"No, I saw nothing unusual."

"Then how did you know? Try to think, Egeria," said her father eagerly. " Try to trace the processes of your intuition. This may be a very important clue, leading to the most significant results. How could you suspect, having heard nothing, and in this darkened room having seen nothing, strange in my manner, — how could you divine that something had occurred to trouble me? How did you know it?"

"Oh, I suppose I knew it because I love you so, father. There was nothing strange in that. Oh, father, you promised me that you wouldn't speak of those things again, just yet. They wear my life out." He had drawn his chair, in his excitement, close to her couch, and sat leaning intently over her. She put her arm round his neck, and gently pulled his face down on her pillow for a moment. "Poor father! What was it vexed you?"

Boynton freed himself, instantly reverting with his first vehemence to the outrage he had suffered. "It was that young man,— that Ford, who was here the other night.

He has gone, after heaping every insult upon me,—after telling me to my face that it was he who seized your hand in the dark seance, and produced by a trick the effect of the luminous spirit hand which turned on the gas. He dared to call me an impostor, to taunt me with forcing you to take part in my deceptions,—and this after the fullest and freest and frankest statement from me of the principle upon which I proceed in these experiments. And he ended by threatening me — yes, by threatening me with public exposure if I gave another stance in this city. The insolent scoundrel! If I had been a younger man, I should have replied in the only fitting manner. As it was, I treated his threats with contempt. I answered him taunt for taunt, and I defied him to do his worst. I a quack, — the shameless swindler! To take part in a mystery whose conditions bound him to good faith, and to defeat all its results by his miserable trickery!" Boynton started up and crossed the room. Suddenly he broke out, " Egeria, I don't believe him! I don't believe it was he who hurt you! I don't believe that he produced that effect of a luminous hand! I believe that in both cases supernatural agencies were at work; they must have been; and a man capable of wishing to defeat our experiments would be quite capable of claiming to have done so. He is a heartless liar, and so I will tell him in any public place. He forbid me to give another seance in Boston! He forced me to quit this city in defeat and ignominy! I would perish first!"

" Oh, I wish we could go away! Oh, I wish we could go home t" moaned the girl, when the doctor's furious tirade had ended.

"Egeria!"

"Yes, father," said the girl, desperately; " I hate this wandering life; I'm afraid of these strange people, with their talk and their tricks and their dupes, and your part with them."

"Egeria! This to your father? Do you join that scoundrel in his insult to me? Do you wish to add a crueler sting to the pain I have suffered,—you who know how unselfish my motives are? Do you deny the power—the strange power—which you have yourself repeatedly exercised, and which you have not been able to analyze!"

"No, no, father," said the girl fondly, rising from where she lay, and going quickly to the chair into which her father had sunk, "I don't deny it, and I don't doubt you.

How could I doubt you?" She sat down upon his knee, and drew his head against her breast. " But let's go away! Let us go back to the country, and think it all over again, and try to see more clearly what it is, and—and—pray about it!" She had dropped to her knees upon the floor, and held his hands beseechingly between her own. "Why shouldn't we go home?"

"Home! home!" repeated her father.

"We have no home, Egeria! We might go back to that hole where I have stifled all my life; but we should starve there. My practice had dwindled to nothing before we left; you know that. Their miserable bigotry could not tolerate my opinions. No, Egeria, we must make the world our home hereafter. We must be content to associate our names with the establishment of—of a supreme principle, and find our consolation where all the benefactors of mankind have found it,—in the grave." Boynton paused, as if he had too deeply wrought upon his own sensibilities; but he resumed with fresh animation: "But why look upon the dark side of things, Egeria? Surely you are better with me here than in that old house, where they would have taught you to distrust and despise me? You cannot regret having decided in my favor between your grandfather and me? If you do "—

"Oh no, father! Never! You are all the world to me; I know how good you are, and I shall never doubt your truth, whatever happens. But go—let us go away from here —from this town, where we've had nothing but trouble, where I'm sure there's some great trouble coming to us yet."

"Do you think so, Egeria?" asked her father with interest. "What makes you think so? What is the character, the purport of your prescience?"

"It's no prescience! It's nothing. It's only fear. Everything goes from me."

"That is very curious!" mused Boynton. "Could it be something in the local electric conditions?"

"Oh, father, father!" moaned the girl in despair.

"Well, well, my child! What is it then?"

"You have quarreled with this—this Mr. Ford?"

"Yes, Egeria; I told you."

"And he has threatened you, if you stayed —threatened to do something—I don't know —against us?"

"I suppose he means to vilify me in the public prints."

"Oh, then, don't provoke him, father,— don't provoke him. Let us go away."

"Why, Egeria, are you afraid for your father?"

"I'm afraid for myself," answered the girl, cowering nearer to her father. "He will come to see us, and I shall fail, and he will ruin you!"

"Egeria," said Dr. Boynton, "this is very interesting. I remember that on the day he came here—the day of the seance—you seemed to be similarly affected by his sphere, his presence. Can you analyze your feeling sufficiently, my child, to tell me why he should affect you in this way!"

"No," said Egeria.

"Do you remember any one else who has affected you as he has?"

"No, no one else."

"Very curious!" mused Dr. Boynton, with a pleased air of scientific inquiry. "Very curious indeed! It opens up a wholly new field of investigation. All these things seem to proceed by a sort of indirection. We may be further from the result we were seeking than I supposed; but we may be upon the point of determining the nature of the chief obstacle in our way, and therefore—therefore— Um! Very strange, very strange!

Egeria, I have felt myself, ever since we came to Boston, something singularly antagonistic in the conditions."

"Oh, then, you'll go away, won't you, father,—you'll go away at once?" pleaded the girl.

"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 co-operation 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—what"—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 cellarway—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 seance 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 justified 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 stance 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 center 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; 1 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.