The Undiscovered Country. William Dean Howells
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expressed rendered it impossible for Ford to approach without irony a confession which he had meant to make in a different spirit. "Then you would not blame me if I had lost patience at any point of the game, and actively interfered in the process of solicitation?"
"As a mere exterior inquirer," returned Boynton blandly, "I could not have blamed you."
"In the dark seance," said Ford, "I did interfere. It was my belief that Mrs. Le Roy was affording the agencies, as you express it, in that too. It makes me sick to think that I should have hurt Miss Boynton, and if I could have suspected her of what I suspected Mrs. Le Roy, I should never"—"You were quite right," interrupted Dr. Boynton courteously as before, but with a touch of pride. "My daughter was entirely irresponsible, for she was purely the passive instrument of my will; she was carrying out my plan—a plan which the sequel proved triumphantly successful."
"I have said what I wished to say," remarked Ford, rising. "I can well believe that she did only as she was bidden. There were other things that showed that. I leave you to settle with yourself the little questions of honesty and decency in thrusting a helpless girl on the performance of a cheat like that. You seem to be well grounded in your great principle, and I dare say you won't be troubled by my opinions. But my opinion of you, Dr. Boynton, is that you are either the most unconscionable knave and quack I have ever seen, or"—
Boynton sprang to his feet. " Not another word, sir! I regret for the sake of human nature to find you a ruffian. But there my concern in you ceases. I defy you to do your worst! Leave the house!"
"You defy me!" said Ford, setting his teeth, and struggling with the rage into which he found himself hurried. " What do you defy me to? Do you suppose I am going to mix myself up in any public way with your affairs? You are perfectly safe to go on and gull imbeciles to the end of time, for all I care."
"I am an honest man!" retorted Dr. Boynton. "I have an unsullied life behind me, spent in the practice of an honorable profession and in earnest research into questions, into mysteries, on the solution of which the dearest hopes of the race repose. Who are you, to attaint me of unworthy motives, to cry pretender and impostor at me? I have met, in the course of my investigations, rude incredulity from the thoughtless crowds who witnessed them, and insolent disdain from those qualified to question, but too proud or too indolent to do so. Till now this indifference has only accused my judgment. It remained for you to asperse my motives."
Dr. Boynton looked the resentment of an outraged man: he gained, in spite of his flowing rhetoric, a dignity which he did not have before. Ford stared at him in momentary helplessness. He was at the disadvantage that every man must be whose habits of life and whose temperament remove him from personal encounter, and who meets others in that sort of intellectual struggle in which his antagonist is for the time necessarily passive.
"You arraign me as a cheat," resumed Boynton, " and you dare to judge my principle by the imperfect first steps of those who attempt to put it in practice, by the crudest preliminary processes. But even here you have no ground to stand upon. Even here the ultimate fact utterly defeats and annihilates your insolent assumptions."
" I don't know what you mean," began Ford, "and"—
"I will tell you what I mean," interrupted Boynton, "and you shall judge your own case. If all our endeavors at spirit intercourse were for the ends of selfish deception, as you claim, how do you account for the final response to them? I am willing to believe that it was your hand that inflicted a hurt upon a woman,—oh, whether my daughter or Mrs. Le Roy, it was still a woman,—and that invoked any possible consequence from the violation of conditions that you were bound in honor to respect; but whose hand was it that evolved itself from the darkness, and then dispersed that darkness? Whose hand was that which crowned my wildest hopes with success?"
"If you mean," said Ford, and he felt that after all it was shocking to own it, " the hand which turned on the gas, it was my hand."
"Your hand!" gasped Dr. Boynton.
"My hand—prepared by a trick so common and simple that it could have deceived no one but children, or men and women so eager for lies "—
"Oh, it was the truth, the sacred, vital, saving truth, they longed for! And it was this, it was this desire, you deluded!" Dr. Boynton hid his face in his handkerchief, and sank back upon the sofa. "Go now," he said. " I will not, I cannot, I must not hear one word of excuse from you. Your action is indefensible."
"Excuse!" cried Ford. "Do you really think I want to excuse myself? Do you think "—
"Why should you not wish to excuse yourself?" solemnly demanded Boynton, uncovering his face, which was pale, but calm. "You have dire need of excuse, if sacrilege is a crime."
"Sacrilege!" Ford was aware of forcing his laugh.
"Yes, sacrilege. You intruded upon religious aspirations to turn them into ridicule. You derided the hope of immortality itself,-—the evidences through which thousands cling to the belief in God."
"You are such a very preposterous creature that I don't quite know how to take you," said Ford; "but I will ask you what you were doing yourself in making those simpletons think there were spirits present among them?"
"I was leading them on to the evolution of a great truth, to the comfort of an assured immortality. But you,—were you aiming at anything higher than the gratification of the wretched vanity that delights in finding all endeavor as low and hopeless as its own? Oh, I know your position, young man! I know the attitude of those shallow sciences which trace man backward to the brute, and forward to the clod. Which of them do you profess? They all join in a cowardly contempt of phenomena which they will not examine; and if one of their followers, more just, more candid, than the rest, like Crookes, of London, ventures into the field of investigation, and dares to own the truth, they unite like a pack of wolves to destroy him. His methods are non-scientific! Bah! Did you think you were doing a fine thing that day, when you lay in wait to dash our hopes,— to prove to us by the success of your trick that we were as the beasts that perish?"
"I can't say that I intended to trouble myself to expose you to them," said Ford.
"Then how much better were you," retorted Boynton, "than the worst you think of me? You call me an impostor. What were you but an impostor who wished to fool them to the top of their bent, for the sake of laughing them over in secret, or among others like yourself?"
"Here!" cried Ford. "I am sick of this foolery, and I warn you now that I will laugh you over with this whole city, if I know you to give another seance or public exhibition of any sort here. I believe there are no laws that can reach you, but justice shall. I am going to put an end to your researches, in Boston at least."
"You threaten me, do you?" cried Dr. Boynton, following him in his retreat from the room. "You propose, in your small way, to play the tyrant, to fetter my action, to forbid me the exercise of my faculties in the pursuit of truth! And you think I shall regard your threats? Poh, I fling them in your face! I value them no more than I care for the miserable trick by which you have burlesqued without retarding my inquiries for an instant."
"Very well," retorted Ford, "we shall see!" He crushed on his hat, and left the house, Boynton pursuing him to the door with noisy defiance, and remaining on the outer threshold to look after him.
IV.
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