THEN IT'S AS GOOD AS DONE
"You poor dear, I should say so!" responded Rosalie. "Of course, I see what you want done. If I can prove that Mrs. Markham is a fake, then I prove to the girl that it's all bosh about her not marrying. I can't give you no encouragement as far as exposin' goes, seem' 's I know Mrs. Markham is real, but if I'm on the ground, maybe I can fix it some other way. How are you goin' to git me into the house?"
"This week," responded her co-conspirator, "Mrs. Markham will advertise for a housekeeper. I suppose you can play housekeeper well enough to keep the place a month, can't you?"
"If there's anythin' I can do," responded Rosalie, "it's keep house. Is it a big house?"
"Three stories—three or four servants, I suppose."
"That's good; I'll enjoy it; I never had a chance atthat!"
"Remember you must get the place from the other applicants."
"If my mediumship hasn't taught me enough to git me a plain job, it hasn't taught me nothin'," responded Rosalie.
"Then it's as good as done," answered the young man. "Shall I pay you now or later? Mrs. Markham's salary will be your tip."
"It's a good paymaster that pays when the job's got," answered Rosalie. Her sitter rose, as though to go.
"Confidences is like love," said Rosalie, "first sight or not for ten years. Here I've opened my whole bag of tricks, and yours is locked tight. Don't you think you might tell me your name?"
The young man reached for a card.
"Dr. Blake," he said as he fumbled.
"Walter Huntington Blake, Curfew Club," corrected Rosalie.
His hands dropped, and he stared.
"How—how—"
"Spirits—my kind." Rosalie extended her hand. In it rested his little card case. "Excuse me. I done it just to show you I wasn'tquitea darn fool, if I do tell everything I know to a stranger. Now don't get silly an' think from this marvelous demonstration that I've been givin' you a con talk. It's just a lesson not to take your card case along when you visit a medium. It's a proof that I can expose Mrs. Markham if there 's anything to expose. Good-by Dr. Blake, and good luck."
The following Wednesday, at eight o'clock in the morning, a messenger boy woke Mme. Le Grange by prolonged knocking. He passed in this note:
Answer early the third advertisement, third column, sixth page, in theHeraldHelp Wanted column. From the address, I know it is Mrs. M.'s.
W.H. BLAKE.
ROSALIE'S FIRST REPORT
Rosalie Le Grange, upon assuming her position as housekeeper in the Markham establishment, had written Dr. Blake that Tuesday was her afternoon out, and suggesting that he meet her every Tuesday afternoon at three in the ladies' parlor of the old Hotel Greenwich, which lay far from main lines of traffic and observation. So they sat on the faded velvets of the Greenwich that fall afternoon, heads together in close conference.
"You're wastin' your money," began Rosalie.
"Tell me about Miss Markham first," he interrupted; "is she well?"
"As well as she ever is—that girl's far from strong. The more I think of this job"—she reverted to her subject—"the more meechin' I feel about it, spyin' on a good woman an' a great medium like her. Git the girl away fromher! Let me tell you, Dr. Blake, your girl's the luckiest girl in the world, and I don't care if I have to say it right into your face. IfI'dhad a chance to develop my mediumship straight from a great vessel of the spirit like that, I wouldn't be fakin' test books, and robbin' card cases, and givin' demonstrations to store girls at a dollar a trance. To learn from Mrs. Markham! She ought to thank God for the chance."
Then, perceiving that she had left his feelings out of consideration—noticing by the droop of his eyes how much she had depressed him—she patted his knee and let a tender smile flutter over her dimples.
"Of course, Boy," she said, with the sweet patronage of woman, "I don't take no stock in the notion that the girl has got to put aside earthly love, and that kind of talk. We've all got our notions and our places—where we don't follow the spirit guides. Perhaps that's just Mrs. Markham's weak spot. Maybe her own love affairs was ashes in her mouth. Come to think of it, I never did know who Mr. Markham was. What I'm tryin' to tell you is that you've got your pig by the wrong ear, for you can't expose what's genuine. And I'm ashamed of what I'm doin', and if I hadn't promised to stay a month, I'd leave this very day." Her companion made an involuntary motion of alarm.
"Don't be afraid—I'm not goin' to yet. Gettin' the place was easy. You want a housekeeper stupid and respectable; I was all that. I was bothered, before I got started, to get the letters of recommendation, but I got 'em—never mind how. And they were good, too. I'm Mrs. Granger, as I told you, and I'm a widow. So I took the place away from a Swede, an Irishwoman, and a French ginny. Right at the start, I found a line on Mrs. Markham. When she was alone with me, after we come to terms, she was just as kind and good as any lady in the land. I don't suppose that means anythin' to you, but it did to me. Big fakirs and crooks just live their lives in terror, afraid of their own shadows. They've got to be sweet and kind on the outside, and so they take out their crossness and irritation on the help. I'd rather be keeper in an asylum than cook to a burglar. But Mrs. Markham wasfine—and no airs and no softness. If the spirit ever hallowed a face, it's hers. I know you don't like her, and you can't be blamed—her keeping your little girl from you! But you must have noticed her voice, how pretty it is if shedoestalk English fashion. Now that was my first sight into her. Whatever she's done, she's never done materializin', which is just where pure, proved fakin' begins. It's as soft as a girl's. It wouldn't be if she'd worked up her voices for men controls. I've been complimented on my voice myself, but you must have noticed the way it slides down and gits deep every little while. That's left to show I did materializin' in St. Paul; and I'm ashamed of it, too. My, how I wander around in Robin Hood's barn! But I'm full of it."
"Tell me everything," he said, "and in your own way."
"'You know my profession?' says Mrs. Markham.
"'No, Ma'am,' says I.
"'I'm a religious teacher, in a way,' says she. 'A medium if you care to call it that. I prefer another name.'
"'A medium!' says I. 'My! I was to a medium last week!'
"Perhaps you don't see why I done that. 'T was to give her an opening. First move, when you're fakin' on a big scale, is to make dopes out of your servants. Git 'em to swallow the whole thing; then find the yellow spot, work it, and pull 'em into your fakin'. But she never followed the lead, even so much as to seem interested. 'Indeed?' says she. 'Well, I see only a few callers, and usually in the evening. I'm a little particular about bein' disturbed at such times, and I must ask you not to come below the top floor on such evenings. Ellen, the parlor maid, always sits by the front door to answer the bell.' That was a relief. I was afraid I'd have to answer bells, which would have been risky. Dopes that follow big mediums go to little ones sometimes; there was a chance that I'd let in one of my own sitters and be recognized. And the arrangement didn't look faky to me as it may to you; for a fact, you're just a bundle of nerves when you're coming in and out of real control.
"'And I hope you'll be comfortable,' says she, 'I'm coming up this evening to see if your room is all right and if there's anything you want. You'll like my servants, I think.'
"Right there I began to be ashamed of our game, and it hasn't got any less, I'll tellyou.
"It was hard work getting the job to runnin', and I didn't have much time for pokin' into things. When I did git room to turn around, I went through that whole house pretendin' to take inventories. I didn't find a thing that looked out of place, or faky. Not a scrap of notes on sitters, not a trap, not a slate, not a thread of silk mull, not a spark of phosphorus. I wasn't fool enough to break the rule about coming downstairs when she had sitters. Let her catch me spyin', and the bird's gone. But last Sunday night I had a fair chance. I knew it would come if I waited. There's three servants under me—Mary the cook, who's a hussy; and Martin the furnace man, who's a drunk; and Ellen, who's a fool. I'd listened to 'em talking and I'd pumped 'em gradual, but I couldn't git a definite thing—and what the help don't know about the crooked places in their bosses ain't generally worth knowin'. Ellen, the maid, ought to 'a' been my best card—her sittin' every night at the door catchin' what comes out of the parlors. She couldn't tell a thing. All she knew was that she heard a lot of talk in low tones, and it was something about spirits and the devil, and then she crossed herself. As help goes, they like Mrs. Markham, which is a good sign.
"Last Sunday, at supper, Ellen begins to complain of a pain in her head. It seemed to me that I'd better take, just once, the chance of being recognized by a sitter, an' 'tend door for the seance. So I begun with Ellen.
"'You're sick, child,' says I, havin' her alone at the time. 'It looks to me like neuralgia.'
"Well, you're a doctor—I don't have to tell you how easy it is to make a personthinkthey're sick. And that's my specialty—makin' people think things. In half an hour, I had that girl whoop-in' an' Martin telephonin' for a doctor. Then I broke the news over the house telephone to Mrs. Markham. She waited ten minutes, and called me down. It come out just as I figured. She wanted me to 'tend door. I'd been playin' the genteel stupid, you know, so she trusted me. And I must say I'd rather she hated me, the way I'm out to do her. She told me that I was to sit by the door and bring in the names of callers, and if anyone come after eight o'clock, I was to step into the outside hall and get rid of 'em as quick as I could. Now let me tell you, that killed another suspicion. One way, the best way of fakin' in a big house, is to have the maid rob the pockets of people's wraps for letters an' calling cards an' such. I'd thought maybe Ellen played that game, she acted so stupid; but here I was lettin' in the visitors, me only, a week in the house. I took the coats off her callers myself and I watched them wraps all the time. Nobody ever approached 'em while I looked. She had only four sitters, two men and two women—an old married couple an' a brother an' sister, I took it from their looks an' the way they acted toward each other. The old couple were rich and tony. They didn't flash any jewelry, but her shoes and gloves were made to order and her coat had a Paris mark inside. The brother and sister must be way up, too; he was dressed quiet but rich, and he had a Bankers' Association pin in his buttonhole. Yes, they wasn't paupers, and that's the only fake sign I've seen about Mrs. Markham. But that's nothin'. Stands to reason the best people go to the best mediums, just like they go to the best doctors and preachers.
"That sittin', you hear me, was real. I got by the double doors where I could listen. You just hear me—it was real. You ain't a sensitive. You've followed knowledge and not influences, and it's going to be hard for me to git this into you. So I'll tell you first how it would have looked to you, and then how it looked to me. I'm not sayin' what she gave wasn't something she got out of test books and memorandums, because I don't know her people or yet how much she'd had to do with them. It was the way it come out that impressed me. First place, she didn't go into trance. That's a fake to impress dopes, nine times out of ten. If you ever git anything real from me, you'll git it out of half trance. Then she didn't feel around an' fish, an' neither did she hit the bull's eye every time. She'd get the truth all tangled up. John would say a true thing, that onlyheknew, and she'd think she got it from James. Her sitters were fine acknowledgers, especially the old maid, and I could tell. That's how I would 'a' looked to you, and now let me tell you how it struck me. You don't have to believe it.
"I was sittin' there just takin' it all in, when I began to get influences. Now laugh; but you won't stop me. It never struck me so strong in my life as it did right there. And it all come from Mrs. Markham. It was like a sweet smell radiatin' from that room, and just makin' me drunk. It was like—maybe you've heard John B. Gough speak. Remember how he had you while you listened? Remember how you believed like he did and felt everything was right and you could do anything? Now that is as near like it as I can tell you and yet thatain'tit by half. You ain't a sensitive. You can't git just what I mean.
"An' thenIbegun to see. I can't tell you all; I was half out; but just this for a sample: I had a sitter last week, an old lady; an' the sittin' was a failure. Yes, I was fishin' and pumpin', but she was close-mouthed an' suspicious. I got it out of her that she was worried about her boy. I tried a bad love affair for a lead, an' there was nothing doing. I tried bad habits and it was just as far away; and I give it up and was thankful I got fifty cents out of her. Well, while I sat there listenin' to Mrs. Markham, right into my mind came a picture—the old lady leanin' over a young man—her pale and shaky and him surprised an' mad,—and he held a pen in his hand, an' I got the word 'forgery!' That's one of the things I saw while that influence come from Mrs. Markham; and if you only knew how seldom I git anything real nowadays, you'd be as crazy as me about her. I just had to use all the force I've got to look stupid when the sitters went out."
Rosalie had talked on, oblivious to Dr. Blake's anxieties and feelings. He sat there, the embodiment of disappointment.
"As perfect a case of auto-suggestion as I ever knew," his professional mind was thinking. But he expressed in words his deeper thought:
"Then that line fails."
"I'm sorry, boy," responded Rosalie, "but I'm doin' my job straight, and you wouldn't want it done any other way. And I feel you'll git her somehow; if not this way, some other. And the longer the wait the stronger the love,Isay. She don't seem any too happy, even if Mrs. Markham does treat her well."
"Doesn't she?" he asked, his face lighting with a melancholy relief.
"Good symptom for you, ain't it? And I can't think of nothing else that can be on her mind. But how that girl passes her days, I don't know. It must be dull for her, poor little bird. She and Mrs. Markham ain't much apart. She looks at Mrs. Markham like a dog looks at his master, she's that fond of her. Seems to read a lot, and twice they've been out in the evening—theater, or so the chauffeur said. We don't have no private car. We hire one by the month from a garage. An' if I ever liked a girl and wanted to see her happy, that's the one!"
Rosalie rose. "Must do some shoppin'. Can't say I hope for better news next week, not the kind of good news you're looking for. But I'm hopin' for good news in the end."
Dr. Blake remained sitting, his head dropped in depression on his breast. Rosalie stooped to pat it with a motherly gesture.
"Just remember this," she said, "you love her and she loves you or I miss my guess, an' there ain't no beatin' that combination. If I was fakin' with you I wouldn't need no more than that to make me see your two names in a ring. And remember this, too, boy! There never was anything that turned out just the way you expected. You figure on it twenty ways. It always beats you; and yet when you look back, you say, 'Of course; what a fool I was.' Good-by, boy—here next Tuesday at three unless I tell you different by letter." Rosalie was gone.
Dr. Blake walked in the park that night until dawn broke over the city roofs. And he drew out a dull and anxious existence,—shot and broken with whims, fancies, all the irregularities of a lover,—during the week in which he awaited Rosalie's next report.
THE FISH NIBBLES
Quietly, naturally, giving a preliminary word of direction to the maid as she lifted the portières, Mrs. Markham entered the drawing room. Pricking with a sense of impatience, tinctured by nervousness over his own folly, Robert H. Norcross awaited her there. She stood a moment regarding him; in that moment, the quick perception, veiled away by an expression of thought, to which the railroad baron owed so much, took her all in. Superficially, he saw a tall woman, approaching fifty, but still vigorous and free from over-burdening flesh.
"Good evening; I am glad to see you," she said quietly. She had a low voice and pleasing. He remembered then that he had failed to rise, so intent had he been on her face; and he got to his feet in some embarrassment. As she approached him, his mind, going from detail to detail, noticed her powerful head, her Grecian nose, rising without indentation from a straight forehead, her firm but pleasant mouth, her large, light gray eyes which looked a little past him. Here was a person on his own level of daring mental flight. He remembered only one other woman who had struck him with the force of this one. That other was an actress, supreme in her generation not so much for temperament as for mind. As he looked over a reception crowd at her, intellect had spoken to intellect; they had known each other. So Paula Markham struck him on first sight.
He was about to speak, but she put in her word first.
"Do you come personally or professionally? I had an engagement for an unknown visitor on professional business. Are you he? For if you are, it would be better for you not to tell me your name—I am Mrs. Markham."
"I came professionally," he said. He paused. The manner of Norcross, on all first meetings, was timid and hesitating. It was one of his unconscious tricks. Because of that timidity, new-comers, in trying to put him at his ease revealed themselves to his shrewd observation. But there was a real embarrassment at this meeting. He was approaching the subject which had lain close to his imagination ever since three days ago, when Bulger said carelessly that a woman had given him the address of the best spook medium in the business.
"I want to know," he said, "all about—myself."
She laughed lightly as she seated herself in an old-fashioned straight-back chair.
"If I should tell you that," she said, "I would give you the sum and substance of human wisdom. That seems to me the greatest mystery of the unknowable. No human being ever thoroughly understood any other human being, I suppose,—and yet no human being knows himself. If you search yourself, you find mystery. If you ask others, you find double mystery. Perhaps that is the knowledge which is reserved for the Divine."
"That is true," responded Norcross. "That is true. But your spirits—"
"Not mine," she interrupted. "And perhaps not spirits, either. Though they speak to me, I cannot say that they are real, any more than I can tell that this table, these clothes"—her long, expressive, ringless hand swept across the area of her skirt—"than you yourself, are real. All reality and unreality may dwell in the mind. Though personally," she added, "I prefer to believe that this chair, these clothes, you, I, are real. And if they are real, so are the Voices. At least, so I believe."
This philosophy was past any power of Norcross for repartee; the faculties which deal with such things had wasted in him during thirty years in Wall Street. But the effect of her voice, her ladyhood, and her command of this philosophy—those moved him.
"Will your voices tell me anything?" he asked, irrelevantly, yet coming straight to the point.
"Impatience," she answered, "will not help you. The power bloweth where it listeth. That impatience is one of the roads to trickery employed by the frauds of—my profession."
A smile lifted the mustache of Norcross.
"You admit that therearefrauds in your profession, then?"
"Oh, dear, yes!" she smiled back at him. "It lends itself so easily to fraud that the temptation among the little people must be overwhelming—the more because trickery is often more accurate than real revelation. I will confess to you that this is the rock upon which my powers and my mission seem sometimes most likely to split. But I console myself by thinking that all of us, great as well as small, must be on the verge of it sometimes. Let me draw you a parallel. Perhaps you know something of the old alchemists. They had laid hold on the edge of chemistry. But because that truth came confused, because they all had things by the wrong handle, a thousand of them confused truth with error until, in the end, they did not know right from wrong. This force in which you and I are interested is a little like chemistry—it may be called mental and spiritual chemistry. But because it deals with the unseen, not with the seen, it is a thousand times more uncertain and baffling. We have ears, eyes, touch—a great equipment—to perceive gold, silver, stones, trees, water. But we have only this mind, a mystery even to ourselves, to perceive an idea, a concept. I wish that I could express it better"—she broke off suddenly—"and very likely I'm boring you—but when your whole soul is full of a thing itwilloverflow." She smiled upon Norcross, as though for sympathy. If he gave it, his face did not betray him.
"Then you say," returned Norcross with one of his characteristic shifts to childlike abruptness, "that you never faked?"
Mrs. Markham, as though daring him to provoke her by his forthrightness, leaned forward and regarded him with amusement on her lips. "Men are only boys," she said. "My dear sir—I could almost say 'my dear boy'—if I had, would I admit it? You must take me as I am and form your own conclusions. I shall not help you with that, even though I admit to you that I don't care very much what your conclusions are.
"To be serious," she added, "it is not a pleasant suspicion to hear of one's self. Now take yourself—you are a man of large practical affairs—"
Norcross leaned forward a trifle, as though expecting revelation to begin. She caught the motion.
"Don't think I'm telling youthatfrom any supernormal source," she said. "That's my own intelligence—my woman's intuition if you like to call it so. Your air, your ineptness to understand philosophy, show that you are not in one of the learned professions, and it is easy to see, if I may make so bold"—here she smiled a trifle—"that you are no ordinary person. You have the air of great things about you. Well, if I should raise suspicion against your business integrity and your methods, it would hurt for a moment, even if there were truth in it. In fairness, that is so, is it not?"
"I have to beg your pardon, of course," said Norcross, grown easier in his manner. "But you must remember that your profession has to prove itself—that they're all accused of fraud."
"Now that you have apologized," said she, "I will prove that I have accepted the apology by answering you direct. I am not a fraud. I have been able to afford not to be. Still, I have a little sympathy with those who are. Did you ever consider," she went on, "that no fraud invents anything; that he is only imitating something genuine? Perhaps it may shake whatever faith you have in me if I tell you whatever these people profess to do has been done genuinely and without possibility of fraud."
"Even bringing spirits from a cabinet?" he asked. Just as he spoke that question, an electric bell rang somewhere to the rear of the drawing-room. Mrs. Markham sat unmoving for an instant, as though considering either the sound or his question. The bell tinkled no more. After a moment, she smiled again.
"You must know more of all these things before I can answer your question. Haven't we talked enough? Wouldn't it be better, in your present condition of suspicion, if I try to see what we can do without seeming any further to inspect you? For you must know that long preliminary conversation is a stock method with frauds and fakirs."
Norcross's breath came a little faster, and a curious change passed for a second over his face—a falling of all the masses and lines. Mrs. Markham rose, sat by the table, under the reading-lamp, and shaded her eyes with her hand. She spoke now in a different tone, softer and less inflected.
NORCROSS'S BREATH CAME A LITTLE FASTER
NORCROSS'S BREATH CAME A LITTLE FASTER
"I shall probably not go into trance," she said. "That is rare with me, rare with anyone, though often assumed for effect. Of you, I ask only that you remain quiet and passive. I'd like less light."
Norcross shot a glance of quick suspicion at her as he rose, reached for the old-fashioned gas chandelier, and turned the jets down to tiny points.
"Oh, dear no!" spoke Mrs. Markham, "not so low as that—this is no dark seance. I merely meant that the lights are too strong for a pair of sensitive eyes. I feel everything when I am in this condition. Would you mind sitting a little further away? Thank you. I think that's right. Please do not speak to me until I speak, and do not be disappointed if I tell you nothing."
For five minutes, no sound broke the silence in Mrs. Markham's drawing-room, except the hiss of a light, quick breath and the intake and outgo of a heavier, slower one. And so suddenly, with such smothered intensity, that Norcross started in his seat, Mrs. Markham's voice emitted the first quaver of a musical note. She held it for a moment, before she began to hum over and over three bars of an old tune—"Wild roamed an Indian maid, bright Alfaretta." Thrice she hummed it, still sitting with her hand over her eyes.—"Wild roamed an Indian maid—" Then silence. But now, the breath of Norcross was coming more heavily, and the masses of his face had still further fallen. After an interval, Mrs. Markham spoke, in a low, even tone:
"It is Lallie."
Another period of heavy silence.
"I cannot see her nor hear her speak. Martha, my control, is speaking for her. But Martha shows me the picture of a child—a little girl in an old-fashioned dress. And I think she is saying that name—Lallie."
The silence again, so that when Norcross moistened his dry lips with his tongue the slight smack seemed like the crackle of a fire.
"I see it more clearly now and I understand. The child gave her that name, but someone else used it for a love name. It was just between those two." The rest came in scattered sentences, with long pauses between—"I hear that song again—it was her favorite—I understand now why it comes—she was singing it when—Yes, you are the man—when you told her—She calls you Bobbert—and now I cannot see."
A bead of perspiration had appeared so suddenly on the forehead of Norcross that it had the effect of bursting from a pore. He was on his feet, was pacing the floor in his jerky little walk. When, after one course of the drawing-room, he turned back, Mrs. Markham had taken her hand from her eyes, and was facing him.
"Oh, why did you do that?" she asked. "It has its effect on me—you do not know how much!" Her manner spoke a smothered irritation. "I shall not see Lallie to-night. And she was very near."
As though something had clicked and fallen into place within him, Norcross straightened and stiffened, controlled the relaxed muscles of his face, flashed his eyes on Mrs. Markham.
"Might I ask some questions?" he said.
"You must sit quietly," she answered, "and though I can never see so well after the first contact breaks, Martha may speak for you. Sit as you did, and wait for me." Norcross walked at his nervous, hurried little pace back to his seat on the sofa. His face was quite controlled now, and his sharp eyes held all their native cunning. That grip on himself grew, as he waited for the inert seeress to speak again.
"Martha says, 'I will try,'" she gave out finally. "Quick—with your question—with your lips, not your mind—I am not strong enough now."
"What was Lallie's real name?"
"Helen."
"Her other name?"
A pause, then:
"Martha is silent. You are testing me. Tell something you want to know—even advice."
"Was there ever anyone else?"
A pause again, then:
"Never. She loved you wholly. She was angry over a little thing, just jealousy, during that last quarrel. She had already forgiven. It was only a girl's whim. Do you want advice?"
Norcross thrusted obliquely from the corner of his eye at Mrs. Markham and looked down at the floor.
"Ask her if I shall sell," he said.
The answer came so suddenly that it overlapped the last words of his sentence.
"Martha says that she is going away." No more for two silent minutes; no more until Mrs. Markham dropped her hand from her eyes, turned to Norcross, and said in a normal, sprightly tone:
"It is all over for this evening. I suppose the trouble lay in your last question. I am sorry—if you came here looking for business advice—that you got only the things of the affections. To your old love affairs, I had an unusually quick response to-night." She leaned heavily back in her chair. "Excuse me if I seem tired. There is a kind of inner strain about this which you cannot know—a strain at the core. It does not affect the surface, but it makes you languid." Yet her manner, as she threw herself back, invited him to linger.
"I shall not ask you," she went on, "whether the things I told you to-night are true. We all have our human vanities in our work; we like to hear it praised. That is one reason why I do not ask. Then I know without your confirmation that what I told you was true. When the control comes as clearly and strongly as it did for a few minutes tonight,—before you interrupted by rising—the revelations are always accurate and true. The details I gave you are trivial. That is generally a feature of a first sitting. The scholars have found an explanation of that phenomenon, and I am inclined to agree with them. If I were talking to you over a telephone and you were not sure of my voice, how should I identify myself? By some trivial incident of our common experience. For example, suppose I were to call you up to-morrow. How should I identify myself? Somewhat like this, probably: 'You tried to turn the gas out completely, when I wanted it only lowered in order to save my eyes.' Wouldn't that identify me to you?" she paused as for an answer.
"As nearly as you could over a telephone wire," he answered. "You're a marvelously clever woman, to think of that," he added. Mrs. Markham answered, on the wings of a light laugh:
"If I appear at all clever by contrast with what you expected to find, it is because I have not let my mind dwell in a half-world, as have so many others of my profession. That is the tendency. I have seen no reason why I should not combat it. I believe, too, that I am the stronger for it in my work. What was I saying? Oh, yes—about the first contact. Probably the last thought of the disembodied, upon assuming the trance state—for I believe that the sender of these messages, like the receivers, have to enter an abnormal condition—is to prove their identity. That is only natural, is it not? Would not you do the same? Think. And what do they have to offer? One of those intimate memories of years past which linger so long in the mind. Take me for example. What should I offer to—well, to that one among the disembodied who means most to me? An adventure in stealing cream from a dairy house!" As though she were carried away by this memory, her face grew soft and serious. With an outward sweep of her hands and a quick "but then!" she resumed:
"The best judges of character—and you must be such a one—make their mistakes. Why did you ask that question?"
Norcross, glib and effective as his tongue could be when he directed or traded, found now no better answer than:
"Because I wanted to know, I suppose."
"Were this Helen in the flesh—young and inexperienced as she was—would you expect her to give you advice in any large affair of business—would she be basically interested in it? Interested because it is yours and she loves you, perhaps—but basically? We have no proof that natures change out there. I suppose that isn't all, either. Is she, keeping her soul for you in a life which I hope is better—is she interested in whether or no you make a little more money and position? I can conceive only one condition in which she would mention your business. If you were at a crossroads—if great danger or great deliverance hung on your decision—she might sense that. I think they must get it, by some process to which we are blind, from other disembodied spirits."
"Suppose, then, that—Martha I think you call her—had brought some old business associate. Would he have answered me?"
"Perhaps. But that does not really explain what is in your mind. If this business matter which perplexes you were so vital, don't you suppose that some one of those very associates would have rushed to speak, instead of a dead love? In that way, I think I can construct an answer—provided you ask that question in good faith. It is, probably, not very important whether you sell or no."
Mrs. Markham rose on this. Norcross caught the hint in her manner, and rose with her. A little "oh!" escaped her, and her face lighted.
"I know who you are, now!" she said. "You are Robert H. Norcross of the Norcross lines!"
Norcross started.
"Please do not think I gotthatby any supernormal means!" she added quickly. "I mention it only to be frank with you. From the moment I saw you, I was perplexed by a memory and a resemblance. Then, too, I caught the air of big things about you. That attitude which you have just taken solved it all. It is the counterpart of your photograph in last Sunday'sTimes—the full-page snap shot. I must be frank with you or you will not believe me."
The mustache of Norcross raised just a trifle, and his eyes glittered.
"Passing over what I may think of your revelations," he said, "you're a remarkable woman."
"If you're coming again," said Mrs. Markham, "perhaps you'd better not delve into my personality. It interferes. Understand, I'm really flattered to have a man like you take notice of this work. That's why I ask that your notice shan't be personal. At least not yet."
"Since this is a—a—professional relation, may I ask how much I owe you?"
"My price is twenty-five dollars a sitting—for those who can afford it."
Norcross drew out his wallet, handed Mrs. Markham three bills. Without looking at them, she dropped them on the table beside her. "You see," she went on as though her mind were still following their discussion, "I don't like to talk much with my—patients. I never can know when I may unconsciously steal from what they tell me."
At the entrance, Norcross hesitated, as though hoping for something more than a good-night. No more than that did she give him, however. He himself was obliged to introduce the subject in his mind. "If I should come again, would Helen tell me more?"
"Perhaps. From the excellent result to-night I should call it likely."
"Then may I come again?" His voice broke once, as with eagerness.
"Certainly. Will you make an appointment?"
"Tuesday night?"
"I had an engagement for Tuesday. Could you come as well on Friday?"
And though it meant postponing a directors' meeting, he answered promptly:
"Very well. Say Friday at eight."
And now he was in his automobile. He settled himself against the cushions and held the attitude, without motion. For five minutes he sat so, until the chauffeur, who had been throwing nervous backward glances through the limousine windows, asked:
"I beg your pardon, sir, did you say 'home'?"
"Yes, home," responded Norcross. And even on those words, his voice broke again.
Mrs. Markham stood beside the table, hardly moving, until she knew by whir and horn that the Norcross automobile was gone. Then she sent Ellen to bed, and herself moved quickly to a secretary in the little alcove library back of the drawing-room. Taking a key from her bosom, she unlocked a drawer and took out a packet of yellow legal cap paper. Holding this document concealed in a fold of her waist, she passed rapidly to an apartment upstairs. She opened the door softly, and listened. Nothing sounded within but the light, even breathing of a sleeper. After a moment, she crossed the room, finding her way expertly in the darkness. Well within, she knelt and began some operation on the floor.
And her hand made a slip. A crash echoed through the house. Following the startled, half-articulate cry of a sudden awakening, Mrs. Markham, still finding her way with marvelous precision in the darkness, passed through a set of portières and crossed to the bed.
"Hush, dear," she said, "I only came upstairs to borrow a handkerchief. Go to sleep. I'm sure it won't bother your rest. Don't think of it again."
ROSALIE'S SECOND REPORT
As though to prove her maxim, "Nothing turns out the way you expect it," Rosalie, on her second Tuesday off, failed to meet her anxious young employer in the ladies' parlor of the Hotel Greenwich. Instead came a page, calling "Dr. Blake!" It was a note—"Stuyvesant Fish Park as soon as you get this. R. Le G.," it read. Dr. Blake leaped into a taxicab and hurried to the rendezvous. He spied her on a park bench, watching with interest the maneuvers of the little Russian girls, as they swarmed over the rocker swings. Even before he came within speaking distance of her, he perceived that something must have happened—read it in her attitude, her manner of one who lulls a suppressed excitement. When she turned to answer his quick "Mme. Le Grange!" her cheeks carried a faint color, and her gray eyes were shining. But her face was serious, too; her dimples, barometer of her gayer emotions, never once rippled. Before he was fairly seated, she tumbled out the news in a rush:
"Well! I never was more fooled in my life!"
"She's a fraud!" He jumped joyously to conclusions. "You can prove it!"
Rosalie put a slender finger to her lips.
"Not so loud. Yids have ears. I ain't dead sure of anything now. I ain't even sure she don't have me followed when I leave the house. That's why I sent for you to change meeting places. There's nothing as safe as outdoors, because you can watch the approaches."
"But is she a fake? Can you prove it?" persisted Dr. Blake.
"I'm a woman," responded Rosalie Le Grange, "not a newspaper reporter. I can't tell my story in a headline before I git to it. I've got to go my own gait or I can't go at all. Now you listen and don't interrupt, or I'll explode. It goes back, anyhow, into our last talk.
"I was comin' downstairs in the afternoon a week ago Thursday, and I saw Ellen let in a man. Good-looking man. Good dresser. Seemed about thirty-five till you looked over his hands and the creases around his eyes, when you saw he was risin' forty-five if a day. Stranger, I guess, for Ellen kept him waiting in the hall. He read the papers while he waited, and he didn't look at nothing but the financial columns. I took it from that, he was in Wall Street, though you can't never tell in New York, where they all play the market or the ponies. I didn't wait to size him up real careful; that wouldn't do. I just passed on down to the pantry and then passed back again. He was still there. This time he had put up his newspapers, and he was looking over some pencil notes on that yellow legal cap paper. He didn't hear me until I was close on him, the rugs in the hall are that big and soft. But when I did get close, he jumped like I had caught him in something crooked and made like he was goin' to hide the sheets. Of course, I didn't look at him, but just kept right on upstairs. When I turned into the second floor, I heard Ellen say, 'Mrs. Markham will receive you.' I didn't pay no attention to that at the time. It was only one of twenty little things I remembered. Stayed in the back of my head, waitin' to tie up with something else.
"Come Tuesday—week ago to-day and my afternoon off. I was comin' home early, about nine o'clock. I've got front door privileges, but I generally use the servants' entrance just the same. Right ahead of me, a green automobile with one of those limousine bodies drove up to the front door. It's dark down in the area by the servants' entrance. I stopped like I was huntin' through my skirt for my key, and looked. Out of the automobile come a man. He turned around to speak to the chauffeur and I got the light on his face.Whodo you suppose it was? Robert H. Norcross!"
"The railroad king?"
Rosalie pursed her lips and nodded wisely.
"How did you know? You've never seen him before."
"Ain't it my business to know the faces of everybody? What do I read the personals in the magazines for? You'd know Theodore Roosevelt if you saw him first time, wouldn't you? But I made surer than that. Next day I matched the number of his automobile with the automobile register. That number belongs to Robert H. Norcross."
Dr. Blake whistled.
"Playing for big game!" he said.
"That was what struck me," said Rosalie, "and while it wasn't impossible that this Mr. Norcross might have a straight interest in the spirit world—well, when you see big medium and big money together, it looks like bigfake. And there was the man with the notes who read the financial pages—he jumped back into my mind.
"The servants' entrance comes out through the kitchen onto the second floor. When I come into the hall, Ellen was waiting for me. She was tiptoeing and whispering.
"'Mrs. Markham,' she says, 'wanted that I should tell you she has sitters unexpected. There's some of her devil doin's going on downstairs to-night. She wanted me to catch you when you came in and ask you to go very quiet to your room.'
"While I went upstairs, I listened hard. Just before I came out on the landing of the servants' hall, I heard a bell ring, away down below. Just a little ring—b-r-r. Now, you know if there's one thing more 'n another that I've got, it's ears—and ears that remember, too. I hadn't been a day in that house when I knew every bell in it and who was ringin' besides. This wasn't any of 'em. But that wasn't the funny thing.It lasted just about as long as my foot rested on a step of the stairs. I didn't make the break of going back and ringin' again; but I remembered that step—third from the top.
"'T ain't easy to admit you've been fooled, and 't ain't easy to give up somebody you've believed in. I couldn't have slept that night even if I'd wanted. I opened the registers in my room, because open registers help you to hear things, and sat in the darkness. I could catch that the sitting was over, because the front door slammed. Then Ellen came upstairs, and the bell rang b-r-r again. I could hear someone come upstairs to the second floor, where Mrs. Markham and the girl have their rooms. I listened for that bell when she struck the stairs. I couldn't hear nothing. The current has been switched off, thinks I. Maybe it was ten minutes later when I got a faint kind of thud, like somebody had let down a folding bed, though there ain't a one of those man-killers in our house. Sort of stirred up a recollection, that sound. I lay puzzling, and the answer came like a flash. Worst fake outfit I ever had anything to do with was Vango's Spirit Thought Institute in St. Paul. I've told you before how ashamed I am of that. I left because there's some kinds of work I won't stand for. Well, he used a ceiling trap for his materializin'; though the wainscot is a sight better and more up-to-date in my experience. When he let it drop careless, in practicing before the seance, it used to make a noise like that. I fell asleep by-and-bye; and out of my dreams, which was troubled and didn't bring nothing definite, I got the general impression that Mrs. Markham wasn't all right and that I'd been fooled.
"Mrs. Markham and the little girl went to the matinee next afternoon. Now I'm comin' to her. You let me tell this storymyway. The cook was bakin' in the kitchen, Ellen the parlor maid, who had to stay home to answer bells, was gossipin' with her. Martin was cleanin' out the furnace. I had the run of the house. First thing I looked at was the third step from the top of the stairs. I worked out two tacks in the carpet—wasn't much trouble; they come out like they was used to it. I pulled the carpet sideways. Sure enough, there was a wide crack just below the step, and when I peeked in, I could see the electric connections. Question was, where was the bell? But I had something to think of first. Where would Mrs. Markham have a cabinet if she ever done materializin'? I had thought that all out—a little alcove library in the rear of the back parlor. Give you plenty of room, when the folding doors were open, for lights and effects. If therewasa ceiling trap, it must be in the rooms above. I went into—into the rooms"—here Rosalie paused an infinitesimal second as though making a mental shift—"into the room above. Just over the alcove library is a small sittin'-room. The—a bedroom opens off it—but has nothing to do with the case. It's one of those new-fangled bare floor rooms. Right over the cabinet space was a big rug. I pulled it aside and pried around with a hair pin until I found a loose nail."