The Undiscovered Country. William Dean Howells
Читать онлайн книгу.
it was not you who did those things? It was not you "—
" No, no!" desolately answered the girl. " From the moment the windows were darkened till my hand was seized, I did nothing but sit quietly in the center of the circle and strike my palms together, as Mrs. Le Roy told me."
"Thank God!" shouted Dr. Boynton in an indescribable exaltation. "I knew I could not be wrong; I knew that you had no part in those things. This is a glorious moment! This—this—is worth toiling and suffering and enduring any fate for!" He caught his daughter in his arms and pressed her to his heart, kissing her fondly and caressing her hair. "Now, now, everything is clear before me."
"I am so glad, father," Egeria began. "I was afraid you expected—that you would be disappointed—but indeed "—
"No, no! You were right! Your psychical perceptions were better than my logic. They taught you where to forbear. Your conscience—I am humiliated beyond expression to have undervalued it as a factor of our investigation—has brought us this splendid triumph. Egeria, we stand upon the threshold of the temple; its penetralia lie open before us; we have defeated death!"
The girl was perhaps too well used to the rhetorical ecstasies of her father to be either exalted or alarmed by them; and she now merely looked inquiringly at him.
"Don't you see, my dear," he continued with unabated transport, in reply to her look, "that if you did not do these things, they were the results of supernatural agencies? It is this fact, ascertained now past all peradventure, that makes my heart leap."
"Oh!" murmured Egeria despairingly. "But I must not lose a moment now. I must see this young man at once, and challenge him to the ordeal that will release you from his noxious influence. I hope that I shall be able to treat him in the right spirit, and with the tenderness due an erring mind; 1 shall do my best, and I have every reason to be magnanimous. But his pretense of having performed by trick what was unquestionably the work of spirits is a thing that he must not urge too far. Or, yes, let him do so! I shall seek nothing of him but his consent to this contest. It may be for the general good that his discomfiture should not only be complete, but publicly complete."
"Don't go, father,—don't go!" implored Egeria, for sole answer and comment upon all this. "Let him alone, and let us go away."
"Go away?" cried her father. "Never! I must overrule you in this, my child," he continued caressingly. "I respect, I revere your power; but it is out of regard for that power that I must combat your weaker mood. It demands of me, as it were, that I should ascertain all its conditions, and remove every obstacle to its exercise."
"Oh, I don't know what you mean," replied the girl, and broke into hopeless tears.
"You will know, Egeria," returned her father. "Not only shall I be clear to you, but you will be clear to yourself, as never before. I have now a clue that leads to final results,—the personal conscience in you, the race-conscience in me. I will be with you again in a little while, Egeria. Don't be troubled. Trust everything to me."
He made haste to get himself out of the room, and pausing in the hall on the ground floor long enough to secure the hat of a visitor of Mrs. Le Roy (who was then in a trance for the recovery of lost property belonging to this gentleman) he issued from the door to which he had lately followed Ford in their common rage. The owner of the hat had a larger head than Boynton, who, as he pushed his way along the street, with his face eagerly working from the excitement of his mind, had an effect at once alarming and grotesque; the squalid little children of the street shrank from his approach in terror, and followed his going with derision.
V.
EGERIA had made a step after her father, as if to call him back, when he left the room, but she had turned again, and lain down upon her lounge without a word. It would have been useless to call him back; he could only have come to renew the scene that had passed between them, and the result would still have been the same.
From her despair there was but one refuge. She could appeal for help now only to the source of her terrors. The fact, hemming her inexorably in, pressed upon her excited brain with a strange benumbing stress, in which there was yet all possible keenness of pain. Presently, it seemed as if she shrieked out with a cry that rang through the house. In reality she had uttered a little scream in response to a knock at the door.
"Oh, did I wake you?" asked the uncouth servant kindly, putting her head in.
"Yes—no—I was not asleep," answered Egeria, lifting her face from the pillow.
"There's a gentleman in the parlor wants to see your father; and I don't know—well, I told him the doctor was out, but you was at home. Shall I say you'll see him? He says you'll do just as well."
Egeria sprang from her lounge, and flinging open a shutter began to arrange her hair. "Yes; please tell him I'll come at once." At that moment she had but one sense,—the consciousness that Ford had come, and that she should have the courage to speak to him, and beseech him not to consent to her father's proposal. She did not know how or why she should have this courage, but all fear had left her. She hastily smoothed her hair and arranged her dress, and ran down the stairs into the parlor to encounter her enemy with such eagerness as a girl might show in hastening to greet her lover.
It was Mr. Hatch who came forward to meet her, and who took her hand. "Didn't expect to see me here, Miss Egeria? Well, I'm rather surprised myself. But I had to come back from Philadelphia before I'd fairly got started on my grand rounds, and I thought I'd make one more attempt to say good-bye to the doctor and you."
" I understood — I thought"—began Egeria, her voice shaken with her disappointment,
" I thought it was — it was "— She stopped, and tears came into her eyes.
"I'm sorry it isn't, Miss Egeria," said Hatch kindly. " I would be willing to be anybody else in the world that you wanted to see."
"Oh, I didn't want to see them! I was afraid to see them, and I hoped they had come," answered Egeria.
Hatch smiled, but he looked at her compassionately, his head set scrutinisingly on one side, while she pressed her handkerchief to her eyes, and recovered herself in a sort of cold despair. "I want you to let me ask you what's the matter, Miss Egeria," he said, impulsively. "You won't think I'm trying to pry into your trouble?"
"Oh, no!"
"Well, we all know what the doctor is: he's as good as gold, and as simple as a child, but he hasn't got the practical virtues,—or vices, whichever you choose to call 'em. Now, you know, Miss Egeria, that I respect the doctor rather more than I should my own father, if I had one: has the doctor run short of money?"
"Oh, no, no! Not that I know of! It isn't that at all," Egeria hastened to say.
"Well, that's one point gained," said Hatch. "I'm glad of it. You'll excuse my asking?"
"Yes,—oh, yes," she answered.
"Well, then, is it something that I can help you about? I don't care to know what it is, but I do want to help you. If I can, without knowing, you needn't tell me."
"You can't help me. But there's no reason why you shouldn't know. You can't help me against my father, can you?" she asked, putting the case, as women do, at worse than the worst, so as to have the comfort of finding the truth short of the extreme.
"How can anyone help me against him?"
Then, as Hatch stood waiting with a somewhat hopeless and wholly puzzled face, "He doesn't mean any harm," she hurried on distractedly, "but if he does it, he will kill me. He has done it, and nothing can save me! He's talking with him this moment, and planning it all out; and when they are ready I shall have to go out before the people, and try it, and fail."
"Is it some test of your power?" asked Hatch.
"Yes," answered the girl. "That man who was here the other night—that Mr. Ford, —father has gone to him to get him to