The Undiscovered Country. William Dean Howells
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said Ford, with a spare laugh of derision.
"No," said Br. Boynton, sweetly, "you can't see it. At least, not yet. But if our experiments progress as favorably as they have for the last six months, we may hope before a great while to render the invisible agencies of these sounds as sensible to sight as to hearing. Don't disturb yourself, Mr. Phillips. Mere playfulness, I assure you. They never inflict any real injury." While he spoke the raps renewed themselves here and there upon the woodwork, into the fiber of which they seemed at last to re-enter, and died away in the sort of straining with which they began. "Egeria," said the doctor, turning impressively towards his daughter, "it seems to me the conditions are uncommonly propitious this afternoon. I think we may look for something of a very remarkable character." He glanced at the clock on the mantel, and confronted his visitors with a smiling face of apology. " Gentlemen, I suppose you came for a seance. My interest in the matter has betrayed me into remarks that have taken up too much of your time."
"I came with the hope of seeing some further proofs of your skill," said Ford; " but if there is anything " —
"Oh, no, no, no! Not at all, not at all!" hastily interrupted the doctor, with a deprecatory wave of his hand. "But—ah—I hardly know how to put it. The fact is, I am anxious for investigation by gentlemen of your intelligence, and I should very much dislike to postpone you— Our landlady, who is a medium of note in her way,—she has lately come to Boston from the West, —had arranged this afternoon for a stance with a number of persons rather more grounded in the belief than yourselves, and " —
The young men rose. "We won't detain you," said Ford. "We can come another time."
"No, no! Wait!" Dr. Boynton waved them to their seats again, which they provisionally resumed, and turned to his daughter. "Egeria, I think I may venture to ask these gentlemen to join our friends?"
"There's no reason why they shouldn't stay, if they like," said the girl, impassively.
"We should be delighted," exclaimed Phillips, "if you'll let us! I'm so little used to ghosts," he said, glancing round at the walls and tables with an apprehensiveness which was perhaps not altogether affected, "that, for my part, I should rather like plenty of company, Miss Boynton,—if Messer Giorgione won't take it amiss."
"Ah, very good!" interposed her father. "Very good indeed. Ha! Why I hesitated was that the sort of experiment to be tried this afternoon requires conditions, concessions, that I thought you might not care to offer, gentlemen. I wish to be perfectly frank with you; what you will see might be produced by trickery, especially in a company of ten or a dozen persons, some of whom could be in collusion with the medium. I pass no judgment upon a certain order of phenomena in their present stage of development, but I make it a rule, myself, measurably to distrust all manifestations occurring in the presence of more than three persons besides the medium. Still, if you will do us the honor to remain, I can promise you something very curious and interesting, — something novel in the present phase of supernaturalism; nothing less than apparitions, gentlemen, or, as we call them, materializations. You have heard, perhaps, of these materializations?"
"Yes," said Ford indifferently, "I have heard of them."
"Mrs. Le Roy—our landlady—has made an eclectic study of the materializations of several other mediums, and she has succeeded, or claims to have succeeded, not only in reproducing them, but in calling about her many of the principal apparitions who visit the original seances. If you are not familiar with apparitions, you may find it interesting."
"Really, Dr. Boynton," said Phillips, "do you mean that I shall see my friend Giorgione performing that sort of tattoo on your wallpaper?"
"Not exactly," urbanely responded Dr. Boynton. "No. It's a curious feature of the manifestations that the audible spirits are never seen, and that those rendered visible by the new development of materialization are invariably mute. But in a dark seance to follow the materializations, my daughter"—
Egeria rose from her place on the sofa and moved toward her father, who, alarmed at some expression of her face, started to his feet to encounter her. She laid her arms with a beseeching gesture on his shoulder. "Father, father! Give it up for to-day, do! I can't go through with it. I am weak—sick; I have no strength left. Everything is gone."
"Why, Egeria! My poor girl! Excuse me, gentlemen; I will be with you in a moment." He cast a sustaining arm about her slim shape, and with the other hand pushed open one of the sliding doors, and disappeared with her from the room beyond.
The men remained in a silence which Ford had apparently no intention of breaking. "Upon the whole," said Phillips, at last, "this is rather painful. Miss Boynton is very much like some other young ladies—for a Pythoness. I should like to see the dark seance,—if I may express myself so inconsequently,—but really I hope the old gentleman will give it up, as she suggested."
"Don't natter yourself," said Ford, gloomily. "The thing's just beginning."
"Ford, I don't see how you have the heart to take your attitude towards these people," returned the other. " It was shocking to stand on the defensive against the girl, as if she were an impostor. She's a person you might help to scalloped oysters or ice-cream at an evening party, and not expect to talk half so magnificently as she looked. The man believes in himself, and it is your ironical attitude which annuls the honesty in him. That sort of thing kills any amount of genuineness in people."
"Very likely," assented Ford. "He's coming back presently to say that our sphere —attitude, you call it; his quackery has a different nomenclature—has annulled his daughter's power over the spirits."
Phillips went up to examine the mantelpiece again. "Well, why not?"
" Certainly, why not? If you grant the one, there's no trouble about granting the other."
"What do you make of what we heard?"
"Nothing."
"You heard it?"
"I hear clatter any time I wake in the night. But I don't attribute it to disembodied spirits on that account."
"Why not?"
"Because there are no disembodied spirits, for one thing."
" Ah, I'm not so sure of that," said Phillips, with sprightly generosity.
"Really? You doubt everything."
" That's very well,—but I suppose you mean anything. I prefer to keep an open mind. I don't snub ghosts, for I think I may be one myself, some day."
As he spoke the door-bell rang, and in the interval between the ringing of the bell and the slow response of the servant, Dr. Boynton re-entered, rubbing his hands and smiling. "Sorry to have been obliged to leave you, gentlemen," he said. " You have witnessed, however, one of the most interesting phases of this mystery: mystery I call it, for I'm as much in the dark about it as yourselves. My daughter felt so deeply the dissenting, the perhaps incredulous, mood—sphere—of one of you that she quite succumbed to it. Don't be alarmed! In an ordinary medium it would be an end of everything for the time being, but she will take part in the seance, all the same, to-day. I have been able to reinforce my daughter's powers by a gift— we will call it a gift—of my own. In former years I looked quite deeply into mesmerism, and I have never quite disused the practice of it, as a branch of my profession,—I am a physician. My wife, who has been dead my daughter's whole life,"—an expression of pain, curious with reference to the eager brightness of the man's wonted aspect, passed over the speaker's face,—"was a very impressible subject of mine, and in her childhood Egeria was so. Since we have discovered what seems her power as a medium, I have found the mesmeric force— the application of exterior will—of the greatest use in sustaining her against the exhaustion she would otherwise incur from the many conflicting influences she is subject to. I can't regret—I rejoice, in fact—that this phenomenon has occurred as it has occurred. It will enable me to present in her to-day the united action of those strange forces, equally occult, the mesmeric and the spiritistic. I have just left my daughter in a complete mesmeric trance, and you will see —you will see "—
He broke off abruptly, and went forward to meet a gentleman and lady, apparently