Munsey's Magazine/Volume 86/Issue 4/The Unwritten Story/Chapter 3
III
On Friday afternoon, promptly at the appointed hour, old Mr. Lockwood pushed the button marked “Professor Veazie,” and presently found himself ushered by a correct-looking Irish maid into the presence of the eminent psychic.
The professor, in unobtrusive black, greeted Lockwood by name, not a little to the old aristocrat's surprise.
“Why, sir, how on earth could you know my name?”
“I could not, on earth,” Veazie smiled. “My powers are superterrestrial. I know your name, Mr. Lockwood, just as I know your mission. You are seeking aid, sir, in finding a daughter whom you lost many years ago.”
“Why, my faith! This—this is extraordinary!” The old man's bushy brows contracted sharply. “It is marvelous!”
“Not for one who communes with those beyond the veil of the great moratic change,” smiled the professor, with a dismissive wave of the hairy hand. “Pray sit down.”
As Lockwood, with considerable agitation, sank into a soft, deep chair facing a window, Veazie took another with his back to the light. A rather charged silence held the two men for moment—a moment like that which sometimes follows the entrance of a fly into a spider's web. Nothing was said, in that space of time, in the professor's chastely furnished, bookish, scholarly-looking study.
Maximilian Veazie had bought the books at the auction of a clergyman's estate, and had never opened more than three or four of them; but the impression those hundreds of pious volumes created was always good. The books on his private shelves, in his sitting room, were of a totally different character; but this is a mere detail.
Lockwood was first to speak—as Veazie always intended every client should be.
“My daughter!” he articulated, in a somewhat broken voice. “My little girl!”
“Ah, sir, she must be a big girl by now,” smiled the professor, his gold tooth gleaming. “We all lose sight of growth, of development, in those whom we have not seen for many years. As I am informed by certain higher forces, more than forty years have passed since you lost your dear daughter, Marian.” ,
“This is amazing! What? You know even her name?”
“You have never laid eyes on her, never heard a word of her fate, since your yacht, the Nenuphar, was attacked off the coast of Morocco, and she was carried away by Moorish pirates.”
The old man's shaven lips quivered as he exclaimed:
“Miraculous! It—it surpasses the credible!” Immitigable grief, eagerness, a pitiful fever of hope that would not die, burned in his sunken eyes. “How in the world—”
“As I have just told you, Mr. Lockwood, these things cannot be known by any earthly forces,” the psychic answered very gently. His tone indicated that he was keenly percipient of the other's pain. Despite the alcoholic veins in his face, he looked the picture of benevolent compassion. “Powers beyond and above this mundane sphere are directing, encouraging, informing me. With them, all things are possible.”
“And—my God, sir!—do they tell you that my daughter is still alive?”
Veazie nodded.
“Alive—yes, and well.”
“But where?” Lockwood's glasses fell off, and dangled by their silk ribbon. His trembling, corded hands clutched the chair arms. “Where is she?”
“Ah, sir, that is another matter! As yet I have been unable to precisely—”
“Make your controls tell you!” gulped the aristocrat. “I must know, must find her! No reward will be too great, if—”
“Ah, but the spirit forces ask no reward, and could use none that we could give them.” Veazie's glance lowered for a moment, to mask a certain gleam. “They are above any reward or punishment of ours, and far beyond all coercion. Sometimes, alas, they are too elevated on other planes and spheres to be reached by our humblest supplication!”
“But—but they've got to tell us—tell you! They've got to!”
“No, my dear sir—compulsion is impossible. With patience, however, with tact and skill, and with a proper invocation of the sublime truths of the spirit of returnity, we may—”
“Where is she? In this country?”
“Yes—I have already established that much. In America—yes.”
“Thank God for that much, anyhow! And she remembers me? She knows—”
Veazie shook his head sadly.
“I am sorry, my dear sir, but apparently she entertains no recollection of you.”
“Ah!”
The old man's monosyllable was sheer pain.
“How could she?” argued Veazie. “She was only a child when—”
Old Lockwood's eyes were blurred with tears as he bitterly exclaimed:
“What a fool I was, ever to have taken her and her mother on that fatal voyage! But I loved them—loved them so much that I couldn't bear to be separated; and her mother wanted to go. She—loved me, too. How could we foresee? And then—but that's irrevocable now. Her mother's gone—died of fever in Alexandria, and—”
“Pray calm yourself, my dear sir!”
“I'll try to. This is weakness. Marian—she's alive, at all events—thank God for that!” Heartfelt piety and fervor trembled in the old man's voice. “I never dared to hope for that. It's only recently I've become interested in spiritualism. I've been a scientist, a skeptic; but—”
“Skepticism, my dear Mr. Lockwood, never leads the soul to heaven. Only faith can do that. I am glad that even at this late day faith has come to you, and that your spiritual eyes have been opened.”
“Yes, yes! And hope returns. I never really dared—”
“Ah, but you dare now! Your hope has firm foundations in reality. I believe—I know—that with proper persistence I shall be able to locate your daughter for you.”
Lockwood's hand trembled pitifully as he passed it over his wrinkled forehead.
“Marian!” he whispered, and tears began to runnel his cheek.
Veazie's own eyes narrowed. He stroked his red mustache.
“My controls inform me, by a process of psychic sublimation,” he resumed, “that her experiences were long and painful. She was sold as a slave in Tangier to a Mohammedan merchant named Ali ben Harib, and—”
“A slave! Good God! Tell me ”—the old man's hand quivered toward the professor—how long was she held in slavery? Not long enough to run any risk of—”
“No, not that. You are spared that torment, at all events. Before she was five, Ali ben Harib died, and she passed to one of his creditors—a Spanish Jew in Tetuan, named Samuel Aguilar.”
“Thank the Lord for that! And then—”
“From that point onward it is all very indistinct. I have certain psychic hints, however, that this Aguilar took her on one of his business trips to Marseilles.”
“Yes, yes!”
“She had forgotten her name, and could talk nothing but Arabic, and—”
“That doesn't seem possible!”
“IT can give you only what the vibratory essences of the higher planes vouchsafe me. We must have faith in them, or lose all.”
“Forgive me, professor! Oh, God, give me faith!”
“Faith works miracles. As I was saying, this Aguilar—he seems to have been an unusually intelligent man—knew that she was an American. He put her in the hands of some New Orleans Creoles with whom he had dealings—one Creole, rather—a French Creole—”
“What name?”
“No, I have as yet been unable to get the name; but I am told that the Creole adopted her, and took her back with him, still a very young child, to Louisiana.”
“And she—she's there now?” Old Lockwood's eagerness, his senile pain and joy, might have melted a heart of bronze; but Veazie's heart was phosphor steel. “She's in New Orleans now?”
“Ah, that I cannot precisely say—not until I establish certain rapports that will give me more definite information.”
“But you can find her?”
“God willing, yes—I can try!”
“God will be willing! He will bless you, too! He can't will otherwise than that I shall find her again! No matter how long a pilgrimage it means, or what labor or expense, I'll bear them all! When—when can we start?”
“Start?”
“South, I mean.”
“Ah, yes—yes, of course,” the professor smiled. “ Yes, she's in the South—somewhere in the South. I have determined that much. I have not discovered the exact location as yet, but it certainly is somewhere below the Mason-Dixon line.”
“How near she seems to me! Why can't we leave at once?”
“No!” exclaimed the professor summarily. He raised a rebuffing hand. “Too great precipitation might ruin everything. These finely attuned psychic coefficients cannot be subjected to the stress of haste. Patience, my dear sir, must be your watchword—patience and persistence.”
The old man replaced his glasses, nodded sadly, and agreed:
“Yes, I understand. I'll have them both, if I can only find her!”
“Of course you can find her! That is, my controls can find her for you. After having waited all these decades, a few months more—perhaps only a few weeks or days—can make no vital difference.”
“No, no, but—”
“Of course it can't! So, Mr. Lockwood, possess your soul in patience. Be of good cheer. Have faith!”
“I'll try to, though Lord knows it's hard, when a man has reached my age—when he has no kith or kin but just the one daughter, the child of his youth—”
Professor Veazie rose and laid a hand kindly on the old man's bent shoulder.
“Patience, my friend!” he bade. “With that, and hope, and faith, all things are possible; but the greatest of these is faith!”