CHAPTER XIII.CLAIRVOYANT REVELATIONS.
What see you there,That has so cowarded and chased your bloodOut of appearance?Shakspeare.
What see you there,That has so cowarded and chased your bloodOut of appearance?Shakspeare.
What see you there,That has so cowarded and chased your bloodOut of appearance?Shakspeare.
What see you there,
That has so cowarded and chased your blood
Out of appearance?
Shakspeare.
In a good-sized, neatly-furnished apartment, of a large house in Bond Street, about two weeks after the incidents which were related in the last chapters, a group was assembled, about nine o’clock in the evening, which consisted of Manton, the woman Marie Orne, her daughter, and Dr. E. Willamot Weasel, of whom we have before spoken.
The dark eye of Doctor Weasel glistened with benevolent delight as he gazed upon the group, from which he sat somewhat apart. Manton was seated on a chair near the glowing fire, with the mother on a low stool on one side of him, and the daughter kneeling on the other, while both with upturned reverential eyes drank in eagerly each word that fell from his lips. They seemed to be enchained, enchanted, while he spoke; and the mother, in the almost total speechlessness of her rapt appreciation, could only venture to trust her trembling voice in low, whispered exclamations; while the sad eyes of the impish-looking daughter imitatively stared unutterable things.
The woman’s subtle suggestiveness had roused the brain of Manton, and fully drawn him out on his favorite themes; whatever of natural eloquence he possessed, and he possessed much, flowed smoothly now, for, in spite of himself, his frozen heart had been warmed by the unwearying deference which he met with from these people.
The lamps burned brightly, the hearth glowed, and the eyes of all were bent upon him with genial warmth and admiringearnestness. The north wind howled cold without, to remind him of the long, harsh “winter of his discontent,” which had for ten weary years been unrelieved by any approximation to a scene thus flushed with the sanctities of domestic quiet. Manton always idealised woman—he idealised everything. He was a poet. The very presence of woman was hallowed to his imagination. There was a thrill of sweet fancies and gentle memories conveyed to him, in the very rustle of a silken gown. He adored, he worshipped woman, as she lived in his memory—the holy attributes with which he invested her, penetrated and held him enchained in peaceful awe. He could not, he dare not believe evil of her, if she bore the semblance of good, in thought, or deed, or life.
He had shrunk thus long from contact with her, not because this interval of self-inflicted separation had been other than a weary penance of yearning, but that his fastidious nature dreaded the common contact, which might degrade or mar that ideal of love, which woman personated to him, and in the worship of which he had found the strength for brave deeds.
It was the weakness, the petty flippancy, the commonplaceisms of woman, from which he shrank. He believed that her spiritual strength should equalise her with man’s physical strength in disregarding common fears, paltry conventionalities, and contemptible topics. The miserable skeleton of soul and body, which the world calls “woman of society,” was more horrible to him, by far, than the actual contact with her dry bones in a prepared skeleton would have been—for where one was a comparatively pleasing object to his eye as a philosopher, the other was but the painted, dim-eyed, ghastly spectre of a living death.
There was in this woman, at least so far as he could judge, a total abandon to her natural impulses, which seemed to utterly repudiate those restrictions which are merely commonplace. This was refreshing to him, from its novelty, at any rate, in contrast with the insipidities he so much dreaded, although his taste had from the first been constantly offended.
Yet she seemed so utterly lawless and quietly defiant of what the world, that works in harness, might say, he could not help respecting her for it. It was a new thing in his life, to meet with a woman, sufficiently heroic, to face the martyrdom that she was daring, for so elevated and noble an aim as the emancipation of her own sex from the conditions of utter helplessness, into which their ignorance of the laws of life had sunk them.
Besides, she had shown so much earnest patience with his rude pride, had followed up its aberrations with such a matronly tenderness, exhorting him only, and unceasingly, to be at rest—a rest, the need of which his proud and fainting soul had confessed so often to his inward consciousness. And then this fine appreciation—ah, where is the young poet who can withstand appreciation? And then such delicate deference in trifles!
He had spoken incidentally of his taste in dress; and now the mother and daughter were dressed in the most graceful and faultless simplicity! The heart of Manton was touched. He felt grateful and pleased with these strange Samaritans to him in a strange land.
On a slight pause in the conversation, the woman, still gazing up timidly into the face of Manton, changed the theme suddenly, by asking him,
“What do you think of Clairvoyance?”
“The world is not old enough yet, by twenty years, I think, to answer that question.”
“My reason for asking the question, was, that I have some strange premonitions myself, which I cannot explain. You will, no doubt, be able to explain the mystery at once—”
“Yes!” interrupted Doctor Weasel, eagerly, “do let us have you examine the matter! Facts have come within my own knowledge, concerning revelations which have been made by her, that are the most extraordinary I ever knew. For instance, when she has been brought into clairvoyant rapport with individuals whom she has never seen or heard of before, she has revealed to them the whole history of their lives.”
“This unexpected enunciation of their life-secrets to men, must of course be productive of strange scenes occasionally,” said Manton, in a tone which had suddenly become cold.
“Oh, very curious and interesting! very curious!” exclaimed the Doctor, quickly. “Marie, do relate to him that incident of the bloody hand, that you have so often told me.”
“Well,” said she, “it has been some years since that a number of my friends, who knew of this gift of mine, were in the habit of inviting me to their respective houses, to meet friends of distinction, who were curious to observe the experiments, either upon themselves or upon others.
“On one occasion I was invited to meet a celebrated physician of this city, whose reputation for purity of character and life was very high. There were no parties present but my friend, this physician, and myself. Such an arrangement, I afterwards understood, had been made at the particular request of the physician himself, who desired that there should be no other person present but his host at the interview.
“When the physician placed his hand upon my head, as is the necessary formula to bring me into spiritual communion with my interrogator, I relapsed almost immediately into the syncope of the clairvoyant state, and of course became entirely unconscious of what I uttered in that condition. But our host, who was his most intimate friend, has given me many times the following explanation of the scene:—
“He says that when the physician placed his hand upon my head, I first said from the sleep, ‘I am content! All is pure here—this is a holy soul—one that is regenerate and will be saved!’ and then that while I was recounting his many deeds of kindness to the poor and friendless, and the rich, I suddenly shrank back, exclaiming, ‘Blood! blood! blood! There is blood upon this hand! This soul is darkened now with blood! Here is some fearful crime! Murder has been committed by this hand; everything seems red beneath it!’ My friend says the doctor staggered back as if he had been shot, on hearing this,turned pale as death, and swooned on the floor; and after he recovered, acknowledged that he had committed murder and fled from the consequences; the name by which he was now known was an assumed one, and he implored his host not to expose him to the penalty of the gallows by revealing these terrible facts.
“My friend, of course, did everything he could to relieve him on that point, and assured him that he would never breathe the fact where it could injure him; that the purity of his life for so many years had cancelled the enormity of the crime, so far as society was concerned.
“But in spite of all this, the wretched and guilty man left the house in overwhelming despair, and the last I have heard of him was that he had locked himself in his own house, and was killing himself with the most unheard-of excesses in drinking brandy, to which vice he never before had been addicted.
“When I realised the tragic results of this fearful insight, with which I seem to have been mysteriously endowed, my very soul was shaken with sorrow; and since that time my spirit has wrestled in agonies of prayer with God, that this poor child of crime and headlong vices might be ‘saved!’”
As the woman uttered these last words, Manton recognised, for the first time, and with a shudder, a peculiar obliquity of the left eye. His soul was chilled within him; and for the moment, the light of the glowing room was darkened as if the shadow of drear winter had passed over and through it.
Doctor Weasel exclaimed gaily, “Is not that extraordinary? I assure you, I have myself witnessed things in connection with this power of hers, quite as inexplicable, though happily not so tragic.”
“It sounds strangely enough,” said Manton, shortly.
“I assure you I have no means of accounting for these things,” said the woman in a meek, deprecatory tone.
“Suppose you demonstrate it, madam, in my case;” and a slight sneer, which crossed the face of Manton, whose mannerhad entirely changed, did not escape the hawk-like quickness of the woman’s eye. “My life, I am willing to submit to the scrutiny of your inscrutable sense.”
“Oh, by all means!” exclaimed Doctor Weasel, springing to his feet in a paroxysm of delight. “Let us have the experiment, by all means! Do please place your hand on the top of her head!”
Manton turned, and with a bow most studiously deferential, seemed to ask of the lady her permission to do so.
“Oh, yes, yes,” and her head was bowed forward to meet his upraised hand; while the daughter, who seemed to understand the thing, either from previous experience, or from some private signal, rose from her clinging position about his knee, and stepped back, leaving the two alone, without other contact.
In a few moments after the hand of Manton had rested upon the meek, submissive head of the woman before him, she commenced exhibiting the common and preliminary attitudes, muscular retchings of the throat, nervous twitchings of the lips and limbs, accompanied by the apparently palpable, organic changes, which are recognised to be symptomatic with well-known conditions of the mesmeric sleep.
Manton watched all these phenomena with the sharpest attention, and then, as the lips began to move as if in inarticulate enunciation, he leant forward over her, and asked—
“What can you tell us of the soul, with which you are now in communication?”
After several preluding and spasmodic efforts to articulate sounds, the Clairvoyant at length said, in a voice only distinct above a whisper—
“I see light! all light!—pure, holy light. It fills the universe with a mild radiance! I can see no blurs, no clouds in the foreground. I can see only angels, seraphs, and seraphim, and all forms of light revolving in the sphere of this mighty soul!”
“Is there no evil there?” said Manton.
“No, I see none; I see only white light.”
“But look close—perhaps you might find something dark. Look long and steadily into the world you visit—see if there be not clouds there.”
There was a pause. The lips moved without articulation again; and again Manton asked—“What do you see now?”
“I see, I see, the light is parting on either side; out in the far distance, between those walls of light, a giant form uprears itself in shadow. Down the long vista stands this darkened giant. He is fierce and stern, and wears a cold, hard front, with flaming eyes, that scare the ministering angels all away. He strikes around him with the imperious sway of his huge, knotted club, and all the bright forms flee. He seems the savage Hercules of pride!”
There is a pause; and after a stillness of some moments, Manton asked again—
“What now is the vision, to your sense?—is the giant gone?”
“No, he is humbled but not subdued; and from afar behind him, down this darkened vista, a light has grown up, like a rising star. It advances slowly, rising over his head. The splendor increases as it comes. Now, the dark and wrathful giant has fallen on his knees—the flood of glory overcomes him. His club is dropped. His eyes, upturned in awe, seem dimmed by the sudden glory of an angel’s presence. Ha! I see! the features of that angel are like his whose soul I see! The giant is subdued! His pride has bowed its forehead in the dust, before the angel radiance of a visiting mother!”
Manton felt his flesh creep as this was spoken, and as the Clairvoyant paused for some moments, he asked: “What does this spirit of the mother say?”
The slow answer was—
“She seems to rebuke this pride even more with her effulgence, and to say, My son, I am with thee in the spirit, but I cannot be with thee through the medium of the flesh which thou hast so poisoned and corrupted, since I passed from thee into this higher sphere. Make thy body clean and purify thy life,and I shall be always with thee present, in the spirit. It is necessary for your usefulness in your present life that you should accept of human sympathies. It is only through such that you can establish a true community with the material world of which you form a part. Accept human love—accept a moral representative of myself—believe in the possibility of its chasteness as well as utility, and you will yet be strong, powerful of good, and happy.”
Here Manton, who had become intensely excited during the progress of this scene, removed his hand with a vehement gesture from the head of the woman, and springing to his feet, seized his cap, and with scarce the ordinary adieus, hastily left the room. He rushed hurriedly through the dark storm, which careered along the street, muttering as he went:—
“Eternal curses on this infernal woman! What can it mean? She dares to speak of my mother again. Hah! does not this account for the inexplicable disturbance of my papers in my trunk? Is it possible that this can be the accursed and despicable wretch who has stolen into the privacies of my life? But think, think! I may have been hasty. This whole subject of Clairvoyance is an impenetrable mystery. That strange story of the bloody hand has impressed me. For all we know, as yet, such things may be within the possibilities of Clairvoyance. That myth she uttered as if she were in a dream, was strangely significant to me—supposing her to be ignorant of all my past life; and then she seemed so patient, so disinterested, so gentle and so kind, so matronly, so tender, and so heroic, too. I cannot altogether distrust her, nor can I believe; I can only wait. I must see more; I must know more; I must comprehend the whole. There is a something here I cannot understand—a something betwixt heaven and hell, which I must bide my time to fathom. Curses on all mysteries!” and, rushing onward through the storm, like one hag-ridden, or pursued by stern, accusing ghosts, the bewildered Manton soon reached his cheerless room, all storm-drenched and depressed.