CHAPTER XIV
For twenty years had Kingston Darnley awaited the call that was to come to him from Isabel. He had made no effort to anticipate, or even to summon, the voice that he desired. It seemed to him better, finer, more loyal, to do nothing, to sit patient until the course of life should bring him again into touch with what he had lost. At the appointed moment the voicewould reach him, and he would know it. But till that time should come, his soul revolted against the notion of going out into the devious byways of foolishness to call up the departed with necromancy or any other prevailing fad. For all such illegitimate dealings with the third-rate dead he had the strongest contempt; it would be a profanity to attempt such proceedings in relation to Isabel; wherever she was, she must be above those hireling spirits who go out in attendance on séances and circles. So for many years he maintained his resolution to be patient, and stiffened himself in disdain of cheap and common spiritualistic methods. He had no idea that people of any sense or breeding could find solace in futilities so apparent. Gundred was his standard by whom he judged all other women’s pretensions; and Gundred had, not so much a contempt as a rooted religious horror, immitigable, medieval, of magic, palmistry, psychometry—all the many names beneath which we disguise our curious longing to pry behind the veil. The very notion of such things made Gundred so piously angry that a certain reluctant, stifled belief could be guessed to underlie and inspire her denunciations. Meanwhile, however, her attitude confirmed Kingston in his, and he remained quiescent, until at last he came across Mrs. Mercer-Laporte.
Mrs. Mercer-Laporte was dining with Mrs. Mimburn when Kingston and Gundred met her, having accepted their aunt’s invitation as a solemn but displeasing bi-annual duty. Gundred made a point of never evading it; Gundred made a point of never enjoying it. Minne-Adélaïde, however, with the years, had grown less flagrant; but the change made her no less odious than before to Gundred, for her love of the illicit had now turned from matters of the flesh to the darker mysteries of occultism, clairvoyance, ghost-raising. She hadtaken to frequenting circles, to entertaining phantoms, to wearing weird, shapeless clothes, and collecting round herself a crowd of people famous in the ‘psychic’ world. And of these Mrs. Mercer-Laporte was the fine flower, the most exalted, the most spiritual, the choicest in ways and manners.
She was almost obtrusively lady-like, tall and pale, and mild and bland, in long trailing draperies of blue. She had sweet anæmic features, and a watery eye that suffused with tears on the slightest occasion. Her hair was thin and sandy, coiled into a knob on the top of her narrow head; her mouth was large, lax, emotional; her glances soulful and celestial. She wore a quantity of mystical-looking chains and necklaces that gleamed and jingled as she languished from place to place with a certain priestly elegance. She fell to Kingston’s lot at dinner, and during the first part of the meal he felt himself truly unfortunate. At last, however, a chance word caught his attention and held it.
‘Ah, my dear Mr. Merrington,’ he heard her saying to her other neighbour in high dulcet tones—‘dear, dear Mr. Merrington, believe me, I have often had the sweetest converse with my dear dead.’ She sighed, as if in rapture, while Mr. Merrington helped himself to a cutlet in aspic. ‘They return to those that love them, Mr. Merrington,’ she went on, as soon as the cutlet had been safely landed. ‘I never feel that my dear ones have been lost. They are always near one—it only needs a suitable medium to produce them. Oh, of course, I am not talking of silly common séances.Thosespirits are people one would not wish to have anything to do with; but, ah! the sweet and holy talks I have had with my own beloved ones in suitable surroundings.’
At this point, seeing Mr. Merrington more favourablyinclined towards the cutlet than the conversation, Kingston thought he might be allowed to take part in the talk.
‘One always feels,’ he said, ‘that from all accounts the spirits that return must be those of exceedingly weak-minded people. The messages they make so much ado about conveying are invariably such rubbish.’
Mrs. Mercer-Laporte turned the watery gleam of her smile upon him. ‘What is matter?’ she asked hierophantically. ‘Ah, Mr. Darnley, what does matter matter? Believe me, you have been unfortunate in the spirits you have met. In the innumerable vibrations of the Universe there are rays innumerable that permeate the Whole with their blessed dew, and consume in their pure radiance all the coarser manifestations of matter. You speak without that inward higher knowledge which makes us one with the Infinite, in those far Universes where the Veil of matter exists no longer, and the blessed dead are free and untrammelled by any more cares of this vulgar flesh!’ Mrs. Mercer-Laporte stopped to take breath, and in an abstraction allowed herself to be given an artichoke. Then, while she was unconsciously devouring it, Kingston took advantage of the pause in her oration to recall her to the question that interested him.
‘Then,’ he said, ‘soberly and without mistake, are you really sure that we can ever converse with our own friends in other states of existence?’
But Mrs. Mercer-Laporte made a profession of irrelevance. In her world it was the hall-mark of wisdom, the guarantee of occult knowledge to which the profane crowd can never attain. She would not have lowered her pretensions by sticking to the point.
‘Go,’ she said majestically, waving an inspired fork, ‘go to dearest Mr. Minch in Albany Road—49, AlbanyRoad, Mr. Darnley; Albany Road in Notting Hill, remember. Go to him, Mr. Darnley, and be made happy. How all of us, bound down in this sphere of matter, how we leap and burn to attain the higher levels through which for ever the blessed ones are wandering on their angel wings! Ah, rapture, rapture, Mr. Darnley! Go, go to Mr. Minch.’
Twaddling and silly as her utterances were, yet the woman was obviously sincere. Kingston had never met the type before, and now he saw that it was not quite so cheap and contemptible as he had always imagined. Predisposed by his secret longings, he prepared to lend a favourable ear, and the dulled sobriety of his middle-aged calm began to break up unexpectedly into a St. Martin’s summer of youthful enthusiasm.
‘What does Mr. Minch do?’ he asked.
‘Do?’ replied Mrs. Mercer-Laporte. ‘He draws the pearl from the Secret Lotus! He will tell you your heart’s desire. He will tell you of the sweet spirits hovering round you. He can see them all easily, and the colour of your own soul’s halo he will tell you too. Sometimes it is pink and sometimes it is blue. Mine,’ she added with pride, ‘is purple. No one but me has a purple halo, Mr. Darnley. But every one of us has a colour of our own, and dear Mr. Minch sees them distinctly and clearly, and tells you all about them, and about the dear spirits as well. And then, if there is anyone among them, anyone in the precious company of the invisible with whom you particularly wish to enter into sweet converse, Mr. Darnley, you might go on to Mr. Muddock at Hindhead. Mention my name, though, just to show that you have a reverend and faithful spirit. Mr. Muddock hasthemost marvellous powers. He is more than a mere psychometrist. He can actually make the deadresume the garb of flesh, Mr. Darnley!’ perorated Mrs. Mercer-Laporte with awful solemnity.
Suddenly Kingston’s resolve of twenty years weakened and broke. The long odds were that this talk of spirits was the mere nonsense he had always believed it. But still there could be no possible harm in trying to find out. And if, in sober truth, Isabel were really hovering on the edge of the other world, perpetually longing to enter into communication with him again, how tragically foolish to neglect the blessed opportunity because of any stupid materialistic qualm of incredulity. After all, there might be something in it. In the avowed belief that there was nothing, and the secret trust that there might be a great deal, he resolved that he would go and see the wonderful Mr. Minch. He intimated his decision to Mrs. Mercer-Laporte. The sibyl showed much mystic rapture.
‘Ah,’ she said, ‘sweet and holy, sweet and holy. The blessed ones are waiting for you, Mr. Darnley, I feel convinced of it. I almost think I see one near you now, but alas, I have not quite reached the percipient plane as yet. But do go to dear Mr. Minch, and he will tell you her name and all about her, and what she wants to say to you. I have had the strangest, most marvellous experiences myself. My own sweet sister Margaret is always hovering round me, Mr. Darnley. She died when she was only six days old, and grew up in the spirit world. I recognised her distinctly, as soon as dear Mr. Minch described her.... Golden hair, he said, tall, blue eyes, high forehead, graceful figure. Then, to makequitesure, I said, “Does your name begin with M?” and Mr. Minch asked the sweet spirit, and told me it said “Yes.” Then, of course, I knew. “Margaret,” I cried—just like that—“is it Margaret?” And itwasMargaret; she had come to tell me that I must go on bravely, and everythingwould come right. Now, wasn’t that a holy, happy experience, Mr. Darnley? Oh yes, you must go to Mr. Minch. Go to-morrow night at eight. He has a public circle then, and crowds of dear poor creatures go to him for help and comfort, and he heals them all—not only people like you and me, Mr. Darnley, but all the poor sweet cooks and housemaids.’
Kingston was not quite so strongly impressed as Mrs. Mercer-Laporte had hoped by the reappearance of the somewhat immature sister Margaret. Yet, though he derided himself for such weakness, he could no longer resist the absurd temptation to put things to the test. He was quite fixed in his determination to see Mr. Minch, if it were only to laugh at him; and filled up the rest of the evening by cross-examining Mrs. Mercer-Laporte on all the other pink and purple spirits by whom she was apparently accompanied wherever she went. Gundred, who looked on the entertainment as a tiresome duty, calling only for one’s second-best gown, was surprised to see her husband so much amused and interested. When he deliberately went across the room after dinner to sit once more by Mrs. Mercer-Laporte, Gundred was quite startled by such a display of enthusiasm. However, she quickly noticed that Mrs. Mercer-Laporte had pink eyelids and a long bony neck; her astonishment subsided into contemptuous tolerance, and then passed into a pious pity. She thought how nice it was of Kingston to be so unnecessarily kind to the poor thing, perhaps the weirdest of Aunt Minna’s weird collection of guests. Gundred called back her attention to her own behaviour, and set herself once more to giving an example of nice deportment to this mob of people who clearly had no notion what decent clothes or manners might mean.
The least touch destroys a delicate balance, andMrs. Mercer-Laporte’s rather watery personality it was that had the power, after so many years of hesitation, to decide Kingston upon taking his long-delayed plunge into spiritualistic circles. Little as he might think of Mrs. Mercer-Laporte’s own rhapsodies, they forced upon his mind the reflection that many good and presumably prudent people derive much comfort and sustenance from occult manifestations. With all allowances made for credulity, hysteria, and affectation there yet, it seemed to him suddenly, must remain an irreducible minimum of fact about the ghostly communications which make the consolation of so many sad, lonely lives. The laws that govern life and death are, when all is said and done, so dimly, so doubtfully known and guessed, that bold must be he who dares, on the supposition of impossibility, to deny continued existence and continued volition to the blessed dead. Who was to take it upon himself to say confidently that they cannot return, for reasons that we know not, under natural laws of which we have no more suspicion than had the eighteenth century of those that give us electricity? Seeing the incalculable nature of the soul, the impalpable, mysterious substance of its being, the probabilities that physical death only give it freedom were, on the whole, very great and worthy of respect. Why obstinately mock, for the sake of a few frauds and charlatans, at a deep belief, as old as humanity, which has been held, and is held to this day, by many of the wisest and holiest among men? What claim to wisdom has the stiff-necked attitude of mere negation, based on nothing but ignorant prejudice and the sceptic’s baseless notion of what may or may not be possible to a thing of whose being, and the laws that control it, he knows no more than any enthusiastic believer in apparitions? Why not, then, take the braver, more honest course of inquiringfor one’s self into the circumstances of the spirit-world? In any case the inquiry could do no harm; either way, one would gain certainty, instead of the present dreary and unprofitable doubt. And if Isabel’s purified soul were, after all, by some merciful freak of creation, still roaming the world in her lover’s neighbourhood, how utterly, childishly silly not to ascertain the fact and profit by it, in place of continuing deaf to that dear desired voice, out of puerile prejudice and a preconceived notion that such things could not be. Mrs. Mercer-Laporte’s enthusiasm had the effect of forcing all these arguments on Kingston with new and irresistible force. He could hold out no longer; his loneliness could afford to neglect no chances of relief; he would try what consolation the Other World had to offer.
At the very notion fresh interest in life began to animate him. Without any weak cowardice or giving way he had yet, since the tragedy of twenty years before, lost any personal interest in every-day life, its bustle and ambitions. That career into which his mother had hoped so vaguely to push him and support him by the influence of March and Brakelond, had long since faded from the foreground of his mind. When at last Lady Adela gently and imperceptibly passed away, she left her son fairly settled into the position of his wife’s husband. Concentrated on thoughts of that beautiful past, he never again plucked up any enthusiasm for the present or the future. It was not that he was afraid of them, that he had shrinkings or morbid tenderness; they simply failed to interest him any more. He retired into that small secret life of his own, and the world gradually came to look on Mr. Darnley as the pleasant but unnoticeable appendage to Lady Gundred. Comfortably vast as was his income, Brakelond, that insatiable old monster,swallowed it all and gave no thanks. Despite his money, therefore, Kingston soon unconsciously held that subtly meek and subordinate place of a man whose wife it is that owns the estate and the money. He had no wish to assert himself, and even at Ivescar it was Gundred who now held the reins, and concentrated the general gaze upon herself. Now and then she deplored to their friends her husband’s apathy towards the Primrose League, but, on the whole, she had everybody’s agreement when she talked of him as ‘perfectly happy in his library among his books.’ “To be perfectly happy in one’s library among one’s books” is the blessed euphemistic privilege of the obscure rich, and Kingston acquiesced gratefully in his friends’ attitude towards his remoteness from their life and the empty clamours that seemed to fill it. Accustomed long since to his own quiet, inconspicuous path, it was with a kindling of vitality, then, that he contemplated sallying forth into the spirit world. It was a stirring of his old self, an emancipation from the obsession of Gundred’s majesty. Half ashamed, half excited, half contemptuous did Kingston set out to enter into relations with the dead.
Following Mrs. Mercer-Laporte’s recommendation he began with Mr. Muddock. But Mr. Muddock turned out to be an illiterate and frowzy prophet, too clearly calculated for the need of ‘poor sweet cooks and housemaids’ to be of much assistance in the quests of better-educated people. However, after a brief spasm of disgust, Kingston decided to continue his enterprise, and gradually found himself involved in the higher spiritualistic circles. At first he had to be content with the ordinary hireling mediums, but as time went by, and his appetite became whetted by the glimpses of apparent truth that he gathered here and there amid thick and more or less palpable frauds, hebegan to be aware that there existed, behind the common world of second-rate believers, a sort of upper world in touch with the Beyond. To anyone with money the lower sphere of materialization was open, and the meetings of Mr. Muddock and his confrères were nightly crowded with the lonely and the bereaved, eager for a moment’s conversation with the lost beloved. But these interviews never satisfied Kingston, and, as he began to discern the higher possibilities behind, he secretly strained every nerve to enter that set of his own people which held, or proclaimed that it held, genuine and constant communication with those ‘that have passed over.’ The task was not altogether easy, and had to be cautiously ensued, for fear of waking the suspicions and the disapproval of Gundred. Kingston found himself despising himself for the cowardice of such a course, until he realized that what he was aiming at involved no sort of real disloyalty to Gundred, and that any concealment he might practise was in the interest of her peace and happiness. Satisfying himself obstinately with this rather jejune and sophistical excuse, he pursued his way, and at last found himself admitted to the upper section of the spiritualistic world.
Here at last he met men and women of his own sort, men and women of birth and breeding and intelligence, whom no cheap claptrap could convince, no vulgar jugglery deceive. And yet these people, keen and apparently sensible, believed passionately and whole-heartedly in the manifestations they evoked. Their lives were ruled by ghostly advice elicited at their meetings, their desolation consoled by almost daily conversation with their beloved dead, their doubts turned into certainty on all points by revelations from beyond the grave. They claimed impartiality, and cultivated pure enthusiasm. And if the tragedy ofthe pitiful, unholy quest had been bitterly heart-rending among the illiterate and credulous crowds that haunted Mr. Muddock’s circles, and sustained themselves with ‘demonstrations’ and aitchless conversation with the inferior dead, far more so was it among these people of Kingston’s own world, where devotion served as conviction, and the anguish of longing was forced to masquerade as its own fulfilment. It was indeed a poignant, tragic life in which Kingston now found himself. Men and women, one and all, were gaunt and haggard of soul with their insatiable hunger. Some of them seemed philosophers, convinced that they were following on the track of a clear truth; others were manifest saints, gentle sacred souls, hopefully worshipping a Holy Grail of their own desire’s invention. Exalted, inspired, rarefied, filled with an apparent serenity of devotion, their company gave an impression of strange unearthly happiness, until the keen edge of their underlying agony was seen piercing through the superficial calm of their lives. The whole air round them was poisoned by loss and the inability to bear it. Their souls lived in a fierce, unacknowledged groping after the lost things they had loved. Men for vanished friends, women for lovers and children long dead—each had some dreadful secret craving, some inner infidelity towards the Eternal Mercy of life. There were old polished men of their world, strong intellects sapped, and keen eyes dulled in one direction only, by some hoarded passion never to be parted with, not even for the sake of happiness and peace and wisdom. There were beautiful white-haired women, sweet and gracious with much sorrow in bygone years, tired with recollections, and divorced from the heats of life, yet still held in a bitter bondage, drugging their pain with this piteous, passionate cult for the burden they had lost. Life and death hadcombined to offer them calm and release from torment; but they would have none of any such release—clung to the ghost of their dead torment, and redoubled it by the zest with which they told themselves that they soothed it.
Into this world of insatiable emotion Kingston threw himself heartily—hopefully, too, seeing that the sincerity of his fellow-worshippers left no room for doubt, and that their enthusiastic belief seemed to give fair hope that it was justified. But soon he saw the fearful tragedy that lay beneath their enthusiasm, and realized how determined an illusion it was that they cultivated. He, too, no less than they, yearned and groped, but his nature, cooler, perhaps, than theirs, could not accept for pure gold of revelation the base ore of hysteria and fanaticism that they unwittingly but obstinately imposed upon themselves for truth. Their spirit-voices were nothing but the frustrate echoes of their own cries, cast back to them across the great gulf that separates the ignorant, unfaithful living from the free, glorified dead. Sounds and sights floated thick in their midst—honest sounds and sights, born of no trickery, indeed, but—though none dared to own it—engendered by the frantic zeal of the searchers themselves. They and none other supplied the words to which they listened in such ecstatic awe; they and none other evoked those vanished tones, those pale reflections of the well-beloved in which they took such comfort. Their very sincerity, their very rapture, only made more terrible the delusion on which they sustained themselves, the emptiness of the phantoms with which they tried to fill the lives that their own distrust had left to them desolate. Only want of faith can make death a reality. These sad, starving people, having made reality out of the shadow, now found themselves forced to create new shadows to exorcisethe old. They had allowed themselves to think that death had power to sunder their loves, and now, after that first self-deception, the need was fierce upon them to invent another to nullify the first, and wipe out that death to which only their weak terrors had given an objective existence. From the beginning to the end they were altogether tragic—in their sorrow, in its cause, and in the means they took to heal it. Kingston, as the meetings passed, found himself more and more aloof from their consolations, more and more cold towards the manifestations that made the comfort of their poor struggling days.
It was not here, not amid these faint voices crying what the listeners wanted to hear, not amid these dim ghosts of bygone passion that his own still living, throbbing passion could hope to come once more into contact with Isabel. He pitied his fellow-seekers, but he stood aloof from them. Sorrowing for the intensity of their false joy, he could gain from their cult no sustenance for his own hunger. His hunger was not as theirs, and the beloved fallacies that supported them could give no nourishment to him. He saw that their quest was false, their methods a mere sop flung to their own desire. Gradually Kingston withdrew himself from their company. The spiritualistic world, after all, held no solid help or conviction for him. He passed away into everyday life again, and went back to his quiet expectancy at Gundred’s side. Sooner or later the wonderful thing would happen, sooner or later the holy mystery of separation stand revealed, but no unlawful human methods could avail to hurry the processes of God. They of little faith might make for themselves a world of phantoms in which to worship a phantom; he must persevere alone, waiting patiently for what was to come. Gladly, if he could, would he have found satisfaction in the hollow solace inventedby his fellow-seekers, but as his nature, as his more exalted perceptions, could not allow him any such makeshift consolation, the sooner he quitted so unwholesome and unsatisfactory a life the better. At least, he had the comfort of feeling that he had left no method untried, had not neglected any possible chance. But the alley into which he had strayed had been found blind, a short cut towards the Great Nowhere. He must return into the broad, beaten track of life, and go steadfastly forward, in confidence that somewhere, some day, he should inevitably meet again his lost companion.