CHAPTER XI
Archie was lying on the turf in front of the enclosed bathing-place where the stream debouched into the lake. There was a good stretch of deep water free from weeds, and for the last half-hour he had been swimming and diving in it. Now, with hair drying back into its crisp curls under the hot sun, he lay on the short warm turf, with his chin supported on his hands, in an ecstasy of animal content. At this edge of the water the bank was made firm and solid with wooden boarding that went down into deep water, but across the estuary of the stream, broadening out into the lake, the shallow margin was fringed with bulrushes and loosestrife. A strip of low-lying meadow land behind was pink with campion and ragged-robin and starred with meadow-sweet, the scent of which mingled with the undefinable cool smell of running water. A bed of gravel made the bottom of the stream, and through the sun-lit water the pebbles gleamed like topazes through some liquid veil.
Never before had Archie been so permeated with the sense of the amazing loveliness of the world, and of the ineffable joy of living and of being part of it. He had wrestled with the swiftness of the stream as it narrowed, had clung to rocks and tree-roots below the surface, letting the current comb over and around and almost through him, then, letting go of his anchorage, had been floated down into the lake again with arms and legs outspread, and now, lying close-pressed to the turf with wet chest and dripping shoulders, he seemed to be part of the triumph of the summer, and of the immortal youth of the world. Surely there was no further heaven than this possible, namely, to be young and to desire and to have desire gratified, and whet the appetite for more. There was no clearer duty in the day than to be bathed in the bliss of life, to suck out the last drop of sweetness from the world which had been created for the joy of men and the glory of God. There was no such thing as evil; evil was but the label attached by the sourminded to the impulses and acts for which they had not sufficient vitality.… And it was Martin who had taught him all this.
Archie had come back home this morning after a day and a couple of nights in town. He had bought Helena her wedding present, he had taken his completed manuscript to his publishers, he had dined and danced and supped, and filled the hours of day and night with the extravagant excesses in which up till now he had never indulged. Some innate fastidiousness or morality had led him to look on the looser pleasures of youth with disdain or disgust; now he smiled indulgently at himself for his narrow priggishness. How utterly wrong he had been to think that such things stained or soiled a boy; they had but caused him to realize himself and intensified existence for him. They were the exercise of the faculties and possibilities with which God had endowed him, and which were not meant to rust in disuse. It was right for him "richly to enjoy," as Martin had said: it was a crime against love and life to starve on a meatless diet.… Above all, he had seen Helena again, had confessed and recanted the bitterness he had felt towards her, and she had forgiven him, and welcomed him back "with blessings on the falling out, that all the more endears," as the prim little poem said.
Archie laughed quietly to himself and said aloud:
"When we fall out with those we love,
And kiss again with tears."
"But there weren't many tears," he added.
He understood Helena now. She wanted, so sensibly, to make herself quite comfortable for this journey through life. If Marquises with millions desired her to go shares with them, naturally she consented. But to do that was not the least the same as taking vows and going into a nunnery. It was the nunnery that she was coming out of. Of course, just for the present Archie understood he would not see her, for she and the Bradshaw were going a yachting tour in the Norwegian fjords. But they would be back again before the end of September. So much and no more had her voice told him, but her eyes said much more intimate things, though naturally she did not express them, and when he asked if he might kiss her (that cousinly kiss which she had wanted at Silorno) her lips agreed with what her eyes said. She had never been so adorably pretty, and she had never been so demurely clever. She had said nothing which a girl who was to become another man's wife in a few days should not say, and yet Archie felt that he understood perfectly all the things she did not say. Most brilliant perhaps of all was her warning, "I shall tell the Bradshaw that I allowed you to kiss me," she cried. "But I'm not frightened: he is such a dear."
Gone, then, were all Archie's troubles and bitternesses on this point. He had love to cling to, and he scarcely felt jealous of the Bradshaw. For, if things had been the other way about, and Helena had been engaged to him, would she have allowed the Bradshaw to kiss her? He knew very well that she would not.
Archie turned over on to his back, and lay with arms and legs spread out to the sun, warming himself as with the memory of that expedition to London. But he had not in the least wished to postpone his return, since the joy of life lay so largely in its contrasts, and after thirty-six hours of that fiery furnace there had come a temporary satiety, and he wanted to lie and sleep like a gorged tiger. Soon he would awake and be hungry again, but it was part of the joy of life to be satisfied and doze, and stretch out tranquil limbs. And, lying there, his ribs began to twitch again into laughter as he thought of the contract he had made with his father last Sunday. Archie had entered into it, with the view of encouraging and helping his father to rid himself of the chain that was riveted so closely round him, and he was delighted to do it, if his father derived support for his abstinence in the thought that he was helping Archie. But Archie need not abstain, so long as his father thought he was doing so, and only just now he had filled with water and sunk in the weeds several empty bottles that he had brought out in his towels from his bedroom . He knew perfectly well that he was in no danger of becoming a slave to the habit; it had served him as medicine to mitigate his misery with regard to Helena, and, now that that was quite removed, it helped him to get into communication with Martin. Of that he felt convinced. Once or twice he had tried to do so without drinking, and had failed; but alcohol seemed to drug the surface-consciousness and clear the way of access, and it was for that he used it now. It was more that it cleared the access than that it drugged him, for he found that it produced not the least effect in the way of making his head hazy or his movements wavering: it only seemed to sweep clean those mysterious channels through which communication came. The power of communicating he could not possibly give up: all happiness and joy of life sprang from it; therefore he could not possibly give up that which facilitated it. But he performed the purpose of the contract by keeping his indulgences secret from his father, and once again Archie's ribs, with their smoothly swelling muscles under his brown skin, throbbed with amusement as he pictured his father's heroic struggle with himself. Occasionally Archie had doubts whether that struggle was quite consistently successful, for one or twice Lord Tintagel had shown signs of evening content and serenity, followed by morning shakiness, which indicated that he had made some temporary armistice. Archie thought that perhaps he would lay some trap for his father, or make some quiet detective investigations to satisfy himself on this point. But beyond doubt his father was putting up quite a good fight on behalf of a non-existent cause. His will was to abstain, and, if occasionally he failed, it was unchristian to judge failure hardly. Besides, Archie only conjectured that sometimes his father's resolution was unequal to the strain imposed on it: he did not know.
All this week Archie's sense of comradeship and brotherliness with Martin had marvellously increased. There was nothing priggish or puritanical about Martin, nor anything namby-pamby that suggested wings and halos and hymns. He was intensely human, and sympathized completely with the fact of Archie's being a glorious young animal, bursting with exuberant health. That seemed quite clear, for when this morning, sometime about four o'clock, Archie had gently let himself into the house in Grosvenor Square a little ashamed and weary, and went up to his bedroom, he became instantly aware that Martin was waiting for him. There was no need for him to light his electric lamps, for dawn was already breaking, and, drawing his curtains apart, he threw off his clothes, so as to let the delicious chill of morning refresh his skin, and sat down for a moment in front of his dressing-table and looked fixedly at a bright point of light on the bevel of his looking-glass. Almost immediately the waves of light and shadow began to pass before his eyes, and the room was full of vivid, peremptory tappings. Then he was aware that there appeared in the reflected image of himself a strange luminous focus over his left breast and a little wisp of mist, like a puff of escaping steam, began to come from it. This grew and collected in wavering masses of weaving lines, formless at first, but then arranging themselves into definite shapes, and he saw, with a thrill of excitement and wonder, that out of them there was being built up the image of Martin, which had issued out of himself. Soon it was complete, and Archie in the glass beheld Martin's face leaning lovingly over his shoulder, and Martin's arm bare like his own, and, warm and solid to the touch, was thrown round his neck.
"Archie, I've been with you all night," he said. "I love to see you and feel you realize yourself. Throw yourself into life: live to the uttermost, and have no thought for the morrow. There is nothing in the world but love and joy. Cling to them, press close to them, lose yourself in them.…"
Martin's smile was compassionate no longer: it was a sunbeam of radiant happiness, and that happiness, so it seemed to Archie, had its source in sympathy with and love for him.
"Don't ever think you are yielding to base impulses," he went on, "provided only you are happy. Happiness is the seal and witness of what is right for you: it is the mark of God's approval. Evil is always painful and repugnant; that is the seal and witness of it. The fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace; and aren't you more at peace, more full of joy now that you have resolved to put hate out of your heart? Isn't it sweeter to kiss Helena than to curse her?"
Suddenly, like the stroke of a black wing, there passed through Archie an impulse of sheer abhorrence. All that Martin said sounded divinely comforting and uplifting, but did there not lurk in it the whole gospel of Satanism? And, as that thought crossed his mind, he saw an expression of the tenderest reproach dim for a moment the brightness of his brother's eyes, and the mouth drooped.
"But you are tired now," said he, "and your trust in me is a little weakened. Sleep well: it is dawn already."
The apparition faded, or rather it appeared to be withdrawn again into himself, and, emerging from the light trance, Archie was conscious only of an overpowering bat delicious fatigue, the fatigue of utter satisfaction. He had had a glorious thirty-six hours, and, as Martin said, he was tired. And Martin approved.
He slept the deep, recuperative sleep of youth for four or five hours, and awoke hungry and eager, and clear-eyed. He left town immediately after breakfast, motored himself down home with William holding on to the side of the car as he slowed round corners and came straight out to his beloved bathing-place. It was bliss to be alive.
He had not seen Jessie during his short raid on London, for really there had not been a moment to spare; besides, Jessie was coming down next day for the week-end. But she knew he had been in town, for Helena said she had seen him, and, with her usual acuteness, had told her sister that Archie was deliciously his old self again, and that they were the greatest friends. That, to Jessie's very sensible judgment and to the intuition her love gave her, was the most inexplicable of developments. Only a week ago there was no reproach bitter enough for Archie's opinion on Helena's conduct to him, no angry taunt of misery sufficient for her vilification. And then, in a moment, the whole of that bitterness had been dried up, the Marah had been sweetened. More than that, the normal joy of life had returned in full flood to him, and the cause of all this was, in his account, the fact that the spirit of Martin had shown him the true light. That Archie possessed that mysterious, and, in her view, dangerous gift of mediumistic perception she did not doubt, for there was no questioning those weird manifestations of occult power which she knew had occurred in his childhood, and she felt now that she ought only to stand in an awed wonder and thankfulness that this supernormal perception of his had, in a moment, worked in him what could be called no less than a miracle. But, though she ought to feel that, she knew that she felt nothing of the kind, and, as she travelled down next day to Lacebury, she set herself to analyse the causes of her mistrust.
They were simple enough. First of all, there was her rooted antipathy to the whole notion of spirit-communication. Instinctively it shocked her and seemed opposed to all religious faith. Beyond that, there were but a couple of the most insignificant matters that appeared to her possibly connected with her mistrust, the one that Archie had made a false, swift invention to account for the noises she had heard coming from his room, the other that he had proposed to get William to spy on his father with a view to ascertaining whether he was keeping his part of their bargain. She knew they were both tiny incidents, but the spirit that prompted them was in both cases utterly unlike Archie. She could not imagine Archie making such an invention or such a suggestion; from what she knew of him, it was outside him to do so. And if it was the influence to call it no more than that of Martin which prompted these things, if it was the same direction as that which had taken away all his bitterness towards Helena, what sort of influence was that? Finally, could it be right that the boy whom Helena had so cruelly led on only to disappoint should, on the eve of her marriage, suddenly become close friends with her again? There certainly he obeyed the precept of that which had spoken with him, and had promised to communicate again, and she could not but think it a dangerous, if not a diabolical counsel. But she tried to reserve her judgment; in a few minutes now she would see Archie again, and could note what change for good or ill this week had brought. Very likely she had been disquieting herself in vain, making wounds out of pin-pricks and mountains out of mole-hills.
Archie had come to meet her, and, as the train slowed down into the station, she saw him out of the carriage window. But he did not see her, for his eyes were intent on a very horrible sight. There were two tipsy women violently quarrelling, and, just as the train got in, they flew at each other, scratching and striking. The encounter lasted not more than a few seconds, for a couple of porters ran in and separated them, but Jessie had seen Archie's face alight with glee and amusement. As they were separated he frowned and shrugged his shoulders, and seemed to remonstrate with the man who had stopped their fighting. At that instant he saw her get out of her compartment, and ran to meet her, his face quite changed. But the moment before it had not been Archie's face at all: it had been the face of some beautiful and devilish creature, alert with evil excitement.
"Hullo, Jessie, there you are," he said. "It's ripping to see you. Look at those two viragos there; they flew at each other like wild beasts. It was a horrible sight."
He turned a sideways eye on her, cunning and watchful, which utterly belied the frankness of his speech, and her heart sank, and a vague, nameless terror seized her, as once again she found herself thinking that this was not Archie, who so gaily took her bag for her, and ever and again looked back to where a small crowd had collected round the two women. They had a few minutes to wait, while her luggage was brought out, and once more he sauntered back into the station, leaving her in the car. From outside she could hear hoarse screams, and, long after her trunk had been put into the car, she watched the door for Archie's exit. First one and then the other of the women were brought out to be taken to the police-station, and at last he emerged.
"Sorry to keep you waiting, Jessie," he said. "But my mother wanted some magazine from the bookstall. Now, if you aren't nervous, we'll make up for lost time."
The road lay straight and empty before them, opening out like torn linen as they raced along it. Some way ahead there were a couple of cottages by the road- side, and, as they came near them, there wandered out into the road an old and lame collie. Instantly Archie's face changed into a mask of impatient malignancy.
"Archie, take care," said Jessie, "there's a dog on the road."
"Well, that's the dog's look-out," said he. "What right has a mangy brute like that to stop us?"
He made no attempt whatever to slow down, but just at the last moment he caused the car to swerve violently, and they missed the dog by a hair's-breadth. And he turned on her a face from which all impatience and anger had vanished, and from it looked out Archie's soul in agonized struggle.
"I couldn't, I couldn't!" he said. "I didn't touch it, Jessie: it's all right."
"I thought you must run over it," said she. "Why didn't you slow down, Archie?"
That glimpse of the agonized soul utterly vanished again.
"People have got no business to keep a decrepit old beast like that," he said. "I expect the kindest thing I could do would be to turn round and put it out of its misery. Never mind, I'll do it some other day."
Jessie clung to her glimpse of the other Archie.
"No, you won't," she said. "You'll risk your life and mine, too, not to hurt it."
He laughed.
"One can't tell what one will do," he said. "I hated and loathed that dog, but I couldn't run over it, when it came to. Hope I didn't give you an awful shaking, Jessie."
After lunch Archie proposed a campaign against a certain great pike which he had seen, and, while he went to his room to change his clothes, Jessie paid a visit to Blessington. The old lady was delighted to see her, and dusted a perfectly speckless chair for her.
"And it's jolly for you, isn't it, Blessington, having Archie here so long?" said Jessie.
Blessington made no answer for a moment.
"I make no complaints," she said, "and I daresay Master Archie is very busy."
"Why, what do you mean?" asked the girl.
Blessington's wrinkled old face began to work, and she looked piteously at Jessie.
"It's a week since Master Archie set foot in my room," she said. "Why does he never come to see me now, Miss Jessie? And when I meet him about the house, he's never got a word to give me. Me, who has looked after him and loved him since he was born."
At this moment Archie's step was heard outside, and he came in.
"Oh, Blessington, I wish you wouldn't go meddling with my things," he said roughly. "William tells me you took some flannels of mine away to mend or put a button on. Where are they?"
Blessington got up without a word and went to her cupboard.
"Here they are, my lord," she said. "I have mended them."
"Well, please don't carry my clothes away again. Come on, Jessie. I'll be ready in a moment."
Blessington's hands came together with a trembling movement as Archie twitched the flannel coat away from her. But he did not even look at her, and went out of her room, banging the door.
Blessington sat down again, and began to cry quietly. "There now, you see, Miss Jessie," she said. "And that's my own Master Archie."
For a minute or so Jessie sat with her, trying vainly to comfort her, and shocked beyond expression at Archie's brutal callousness to his old nurse. And then the door opened again, and Archie looked in. Once again all his anger and impatience had died out of his face, his real soul looked from his eyes as from a prison-house, and his voice shook as he spoke.
"Go away, please, Jessie, and leave me with Blessington for a minute," he said.
And then he came across the room to her, and knelt down by her, and took her withered old hand in his, and stroked it and kissed it. So much Jessie saw before she closed the door behind her.
"Blessington, my old darling," said Archie, "I can't think why I have been so beastly to you. It wasn't me, that's all I can tell you. I always love you. Can you forgive me?"
Blessington's loyal devotion rose triumphant.
"Eh, I know how busy you've been, Master Archie," she said, "and I know what a thoughtless body I am with your things. But I'd like you to be angry with me fifty times, if you'll only come back to me at the end. There pray-a-don't kiss my hand, dear. It isn't right for you to do that."
"Where's your darling face then?" said Archie. "If you don't give me a kiss this minute, I shall know you've been flirting with father's keeper again."
Blessington gave a little squeal of laughter.
"Eh, and him dead this twenty years," she said. "And you know, my dear, that whatever you did, and asked me to give you a kiss afterwards, give it you I would, because nothing you could do would stop my loving you."
Blessington's love, Helena's love … which was real? Two things so utterly different could not both be love. And for him, too, which love was real, his love for Blessington, all ashed over save for the little spark that somehow lived below the cold cinders, or his love for Helena that blazed and scintillated? Suddenly the thought of that glowed within him, and it seemed dreadful to kiss this withered cheek. And yet the dim old eyes had never wavered in their loyalty and love for his worthless, corrupted self.
"And shall we have a talk this evening again before dinner?" he asked.
"Eh, that would be nice if you're not too busy," said she.
"All right, then. But I must run along now: Jessie's waiting."
"That'll never do to keep her waiting," said Blessington. "And if you're going on the lake, Master Archie, pray be careful and don't fall in."
Lady Tintagel with Jessie and Archie were going up to town on Monday to attend Helena's wedding the day after, and all through the hours of that week-end there was piling up ever higher and more meancingly the storm that so soon was to burst upon Europe in tempest of shot and shell. Before they left on Monday afternoon war was already declared between Russia and Germany, between Germany and France, the territory of Belgium was violated by the barbarian hordes who issued from the Central Empires, and Belgium had appealed to England to uphold the treaty which Germany had torn up to light the fires of war. But, as in so many English homes in these days, the inevitable still seemed the incredible, and, though from time to time they discussed the situation, life went on its normal course. Indeed, there was nothing else to be done: whether England was going to war or not, dinner-time came round as usual.…
Of them all, it was on Lord Tintagel that the suspense and anxiety beat most strongly, and that because the panic on the Stock Exchanges of Europe threatened him with losses that might bring him within reach of ruin. But Lady Tintagel still clung to a baseless hope, less substantial than a mirage in the desert, that diplomacy would still avert disaster, Archie went about the customary diversions of life with more than usual enjoyment and absorption, while for Jessie there loomed in the immediate foreground a dread and a horror, which, though it concerned not warring millions, but just one individual, engrossed her entire soul.
It was as if she saw him whom she loved with all the strength of her deep and loyal heart in danger of drowning, not in material waters that could but kill the body and set free the soul, but in some awful flooding evil which threatened to submerge and swallow the very source and spiritual life of him. And, all the time, he swam and splashed about in those waters, below which lay hell itself, with the same joyful gaiety as he used to churn his way out to sea at Silorno. As by some hideous irony, the love of deep waters far from shore that all his life had possessed him, so that his physical self was at the zenith of its capacity for enjoyment when the profound gulfs were below him, and the land far off, so now evil, essential and primeval evil, had beckoned his soul out over unplumbed depths that seemed to him bright with celestial sunshine. Not yet was he doomed to sink there, though she guessed, as in a nightmare, in what deadly peril he stood, for now and again some inkling of that which menaced him reached his true self, and he turned back with shuddering and contrition from some evil prompting. All the time this betrayed itself to Jessie in things that might so reasonably have been called mere trifles. An impatient, impetuous boy, as Archie undoubtedly was, might so naturally have lost his temper with a decrepit old dog which strayed on to the path of his flying car, and made him say that it would be the kindest thing to run over it. That same boy might so naturally have felt an unedifying curiosity in two drunken women righting together, or have reasonably been annoyed when, in a hurry to change his clothes, he found that his old nurse had taken them away. Indeed, it was the strength of his own reaction against such impulses that showed how alien he knew them to be to his real self. But her own feeling about them was the final test, for she knew it was based on the infallible intuition of her love for him. It was impossible that that should be mistaken, and it told her that it was not Archie at all who had committed these acts, which might be trifling in themselves, but, like wisps of cloud in the sky, showed which way the great winds were blowing. And on the top of these was something which Jessie could not conceive of as being a trifle, namely, Archie's complete reconciliation with her sister. She could not believe that it was a noble impulse which prompted that, and extinguished his bitter resentment against her as easily as a candle is blown out. He was right to be bitter against her, and the love, with which he seemed inspired again, was not love at all. But he believed that this desire was love, and according to his account it was the spirit of Martin which had taught him that and opened his blinded eyes. It was Martin, then, who possessed him. And that, to Jessie, was the most incredible of all. It was not, and it could not be, Martin.
She sat by her open window that Sunday night, wishing that she could think that some madness had fallen upon her, which caused her to conceive such inconceivable things. Archie's laugh still sounded in her ears, gay and boyish, as she had heard it but two minutes before she came up to bed. And she shuddered at the cause of it. Once again, she and Archie had strolled out after dinner, and, on passing the windows of his father's study, their steps noiseless on the grass, Archie had laid his hand on her arm with a gesture to command silence, and had tiptoed with her across the gravel to his father's windows. Lord Tintagel was inside, and, even as they looked, he took a bottle out of which he had been pouring something, and locked it up in a cupboard.
Archie turned a face beaming with merriment on her.
"Come in," he whispered, "to say good-night. Leave it all to me. It will be huge fun."
He waited a moment, and began talking loudly to her on some indifferent subject for a few seconds. Then he said:
"Come and say good-night to my father, Jessie," and they entered together.
Lord Tintagel was seated in his chair by this time: there was just one empty glass on the tray, with a syphon, and no sign of a second one. Archie began walking up and down the room, his eyes looking swiftly and stealthily in every direction.
"Jessie and I have just come in to say good-night," he said. "We're all going up to town to-morrow. Won't you really come, father?"
"I've already said I won't," said Lord Tintagel sharply.
Archie suddenly saw what he had been looking for.
"Hullo, here's a funny thing," he said. "Here's a glass on the floor."
He picked it up, smelled it, and burst into a peal of laughter.
"Father, it's too bad of you!" he said. "There have I been keeping our bargain, while you"
He broke off, laughing again.
"No, I'll confess," he said, "because I'm so pleased at having found you out. I've been having some quiet drinks up in my bedroom while you've been doing the same down here. What did you do with your bottles? I put mine in the lake. I say, that is funny, isn't it? But it's rather unsociable. Let's follow Germany's example, and call our treaty waste paper."
And Archie had laughed over that miserable sordid exposure, just as light-heartedly as he had laughed over the jolly innocent humours at Silorno, and, sick at heart, Jessie had left the two together with the bottle which there was no need to conceal any more.
She sat long at her window in a miserable state of horror and fear and agitation, now trying to persuade herself that she was taking these things too heavily—Helena had always told her she took things heavily—now letting her fears issue in terrible cohort and looking them in the face. It was her powerlessness to help that most tortured her, her fate of having to stand and watch while Archie pushed out ever farther, with delight and joy, on to the perilous seas. But now there was to her a reality about it all which she had never wholly felt before. Often she had told herself that she was imagining perils, but to-night, in the darkness and the quiet, she felt herself face to face with the grim, deadly facts. Spiritual and ghostly enemies were about, and next moment she had slid on to her knees. No words came: she tried just to open her heart to that light that surely shone through the evil that swarmed about her. Something, ever so faint, glimmered there, and presently she rose again with her soul fixed on that little spark shining within her. In any case, she must make every effort to help, instead of succumbing to her sense of powerlessness.
At that moment she heard light, swift footsteps on the stairs, and instantly her mind was made up, and she came out into the broad passage just as Archie was opposite her door. His face was eager and alert; there was no trace of intoxication there.
"Hullo, Jessie," he said, smiling. "Not gone to bed yet?"
She had to be wise: mere helpless prayer would avail nothing if she did not exert herself and make use of her wits and her love.
"No: I didn't feel sleepy," she said. "You don't look sleepy either. Are you going to bed?"
"No, not yet," said Archie.
Jessie came a step closer to him.
"Oh, Archie, are you going to talk to Martin?" she asked. "Mayn't I come? I should so love to, for I know all that Martin means to you. You know I did hear him talking to you before. It would be lovely if I could hear you talking together, so that I knew what he said."
Archie looked at her.
"Well, I don't know why not," he said. "But you must promise not to interrupt. Perhaps you'll neither hear nor see anything. But I don't see why you shouldn't try. It's just a séance. Come along, Jessie."
He led the way into his bedroom, and shut the door.
"I shall really rather like you to be here," he said. "I'm glad you suggested it. For now and then I go into very deep trance, and then I can't remember what exactly has happened. I only know that there has been round me an atmosphere—to call it that—in which I glow and expand. Sometimes I rather think I struggle and groan: you mustn't mind that. It's only the protest of my material earthly self. Come on: let's begin. I long for Martin to come."
Jessie felt her dread and horror of the occult surge up in her, and it required all her resolution to remain here. But the call of her love was imperative: if she was to be permitted to help Archie at all, she must learn what it was that possessed him, and find means to combat it. She had to know first what it was, penetrate, so far as her love had power, into the source of it, diagnose it, if she was to help in curing.
"What are you going to do?" she said.
"It's very simple; you'll soon see. Sit down, Jessie."
He went to the window and drew aside the curtains. He put on the table in front of where he was to sit the silver top of some toilet-bottle, and then went to the door and turned out all the electric lights at the switchboard. The moonlight outside, without shining directly into the room, made the objects in it clearly though duskily visible, and Jessie, where she sat with her back to the light, could see Archie's face and outline, when her eyes got accustomed to the dimness, quite distinctly. He sat close to her at the end of the writing-table, and just in front of him glimmered the stopper from the toilet-bottle.
"Now I'm going to look at that till I go off into trance," he said. "Watch what happens very closely, for I may go into deep trance, and promise me not to move till I come round again. I daresay you will neither hear nor see anything, but I don't know."
For some few minutes, as far as the girl could judge, they sat in silence. Once or twice Archie shifted his position slightly, and she heard his shirt-front creak a little as he breathed quietly and normally. Outside a little wind stirred, and the tassel of the blind tapped against the sill.
Then there came a change: his breathing grew louder, as if he panted for air, and now and again he moaned, and she saw his head drop forward. This moaning sound was horrible to hear, and, but for her promise, and the insistent urging of her love, she must have got up and roused him. His breath whistled between his lips as he took it in, and his face seemed to be shining with some dew of anguish, and his arms twisted and writhed as if struggling against some overmastering force. Then suddenly all sign of struggle ceased, he sat bent forward, but perfectly still, and from the table in front of him came three loud, peremptory raps, as of splitting wood. From the dusk of the room came others which she could not localize.
Archie raised his head, and, instead of leaning over the table, sank back in his chair, his arms hanging limp by his side. He began to whisper to himself, and soon Jessie caught the words.
"Martin, are you here?" he kept repeating. "Martin, are you here? Martin, Martin?"
There was more light in the room now. It came from a pale greyish efflorescence of illumination, globular in shape, that lay apparently over his left breast. It made its immediate neighbourhood quite bright: she could see the stud in his shirt with absolute distinctness. Out of it there came a little wisp of mist that floated up like a stream of smoke above his shoulders. In the air there, independently of this, there was forming another mistlike substance, and the stream that came away from Archie seemed to join this. It began to take shape: it spread upwards and downwards into the semblance of a column, its edges losing themselves in the dark. Lines began to be interwoven within it: it was as if something was forming inside it, like a chicken in an egg. It lost its vagueness of outline, plaiting and weaving itself together: there appeared an arm bare to the shoulder; above that she could see a neck, and slowly above the neck there grew a smiling, splendid face. There seemed to be a grey robe cast about the body, from which the bare arm protruded, but much of this was vague.
Jessie felt as if some awful paralysis of terror lay over her spirit. The whole room, cool and fresh with the night-air passing through the open window, reeked, to her spiritual sense, with evil and unnameable corruption. Over her conscious superficial self, the mechanism that directed her limbs and worked in her brain, she had complete control: for Archie's sake she was learning about this hellish visitor who came to him. But within, her soul cried out in a horror of uttermost darkness. Then her will took hold of that too: whatever God permitted must be faced for the sake of love.
Just then Archie spoke in an odd muffled voice.
"I'm going very deep," he said. "But, Martin, you've made me so happy all day. You've hardly left me at all. You're getting to be part of me, aren't you? Let's talk about Helena. I say, she is a devil, isn't she?"
Jessie had not known that anything could be so horrible as the smiling face that the apparition bent on him.
"But you've ceased hating her," it said. "You love her, don't you? Always cling to love!"
"I know. I adore her. I believe she loves me too." He laughed and licked his lips and his voice sank, so that Jessie could catch no word of what he said. But he spoke for a long time, laughing occasionally, and making horrible little movements with his arms as if he clasped something. Now and then he would perhaps ask a question, for in the same inaudible manner the apparition answered him, laughing sometimes in response. Once or twice in that devilish colloquy she caught a word or two of hideous and carnal import, and her sickened love nearly withered within her. But because love is immortal, and cannot perish though all the blasts of hell rage against it, it still stood firm, though scorched and beaten upon. If she let it die, she felt that she would be no better than that visible incarnation of evil that smiled and bent over Archie.
Presently that devilish whispering ceased, and she saw that the apparition was beginning to lose its clearness of outline. Slowly it began to disintegrate into the weavings of mist out of which it came, and Archie said, "Good-bye, Martin, but not for long." Some of these streamers seemed to disperse in the air, others, like an eddying water-spout, seemed to draw back into that focus of light which lay over Archie's breast. Then that too began to fade, and in the stillness and quiet she again heard the creaking of his shirt as he lay back in his chair with closed eyes. Then the struggles and meanings, the writhings of his arms began again, and again subsided, and he lay quite still. Outside the night-wind stirred and dropped.
Then Archie spoke in a tired, husky voice.
"Hullo, Jessie," he said, "it's all over. By Jove, it was ripping. But I went awfully deep. I can remember nothing after Martin came. What did he say?"
Jessie got up.
"I heard hardly anything," she said. "He spoke in whispers, and so did you."
"Did you see him?" asked Archie.
"Yes, quite clearly. But I think I'll go to bed now. You look very tired."
He had got up and turned on the electric light, and stood by the door rubbing his eyes.
"Yes, I am tired," he said, "but I'm divinely happy. Tell me to-morrow whatever you can remember. Good-night, Jess. You are a good sort."
He detained her hand for a moment.
"We're cousins, Jess," he said, "and you're an awfully good friend. Won't you give me a kiss?"
For one second she shrank from him in nameless horror. The next she put it all from her, for her shrinking, no angel of the Lord, but a weak, cowardly impulse, stood full in the path of love, and while it was there she could not reach Archie.
"Why, of course," she said, kissing him. "Good-night, Archie; sleep well."
She went to her room, and turned on all the lights. She felt as if she had been assisting at some unclean orgy, she felt tainted and defiled by the very presence of that white evil thing that had stood close to her, and whispered and laughed with Archie. As yet she had but looked on it; what lay in front of her was to grapple with it and tear it out of the tabernacle which it had begun to inhabit. As far as she could understand the situation, it was not wholly in possession as yet, for part of it, when it materialised, seemed to form itself in the air, and part only to ooze out of its victim. Through what adventures and combats her way should take her she could form no conception, but what she had gained to-night, which was worth a hundred times the sickness and horror of her soul, was the certain knowledge that some spirit of discarnate evil was making its home in her beloved. It had usurped the guise of Martin, it masqueraded as Martin, Archie thought it was Martin. She remembered how, just a week ago, he had told her that he was like an empty house, denuded of the spirit that dwelt there, a living corpse by which he asked her to sit sometimes. At the time that had seemed to her just the figure by which he expressed the desolation of his heart; now it revealed itself as a true and literal statement. And there had begun to enter into him, as tenant of the uninhabited rooms, the horror that she had seen.
Jessie fell on her knees by her bedside, and opened her heart to the Infinite Love. It was through Its aid alone that she would be able to accomplish the rescue for which she was willing to give her life and soul.