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Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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ROFESSOR" MAXIMILIAN MESMER sat in his room in Gordon Square awaiting the arrival of his latest client, Lord Dynellen, V.C. He was a tall, lean, lithely-built man, still young, and extraordinarily good-looking in a dark, distinguished style. A curious air of power and authority radiated from him, even in his simplest movements and most tranquil moods. One did not find it difficult to understand that women in particular admired him and men respected him—despite the very natural suspicion which his profession is usually regarded.
He was wearing a long purple gown, rather like a flowing, very full cassock, and a square, flat, four-cornered purple cap. Sitting in a big, throne-like chair, facing a heavy ebony table, he was watching his assistant—one Ermond, a thin, ascetic-looking man, also young—put the finishing touches to the room. Lightless save for one solitary mauve-shaded electric bulb, which hung down from the ceiling, it was not an apartment calculated to appeal to the taste or temperament of the average person as being an inviting room for everyday use. It was very large, with a lofty, arched ceiling, covered with huge, mysterious hieroglyphics. The walls were hung entirely with costly, heavy purple curtains, and floor was of black parquet strewn with tiger and leopard skins. Around the room at irregular intervals were four very fine mummy-cases, and in a far corner was an extraordinary piece of sculpture representing a satyr mounted on a unicorn engaged in fighting a huge, flat-headed, open-jawed serpent. Over the satyr hung a censer, the fumes from which were filling the room.
Presently, faint and far-off in some subterranean part of the house, an electric bell whirred, and Ermond, the assistant, left the medium alone. Mesmer made an arresting figure. Leaning forward, his elbow on the arm of the "throne," his chin resting on his elbow, and quite motionless, his firm, clear, pale face stood out startlingly against the purple background. The light shone down full on his face, and the big black eyes seemed to have burning in their depths a strange, cold flame that fascinated whilst it repelled.
It was not to be wondered at that ninety-nine people out of a hundred who called there spoke of the room and its occupant as mysterious, The whole place was pervaded with mystery, with the atmosphere of unguessable things. One seemed always on the edge of discovery of new knowledge in that apartment.
A curtain swung back. Ermond ushered in Lord Dynellen and vanished.
"Be seated," said the medium, in a deep, rich, profound voice that boomed through the apartment like a big bronze bell. He did not move even to look at the visitor.
Lord Dynellen, a tall, intellectual-looking man of about thirty, paused a moment to glance amusedly round the room.
Then he took the chair facing Mesmer and, fingering his trim moustache, stared thoughtfully into the black eyes of the medium. His own eyes were clear grey and very steady. Strength was written plainly on all his features—his clean, jutting chin, firm lips, clear-cut nose, broad forehead, and frank, unafraid eyes.
The medium did not speak. He only stared steadily at his client. But in the depths of his eyes burned that cold, still flame which he had never yet known to fail in its effect upon those at whom he gazed.
And suddenly Dynellen appeared to realize that his own will was no match for that of this pale student of the occult, for he flushed a little, sat bolt upright, dropped his eyes for a second, lifted them again, and spoke.
"I wish to consult you upon a matter which should be very distinctly in your province—if you are not a charlatan," said Dynellen. But he said it in such a way that the end of the remark was less of an insult than a challenge. "If your advertisements and your claims are genuine—I have to be frank—I think you will find my case simplicity itself. If they are not, then I am only where I started. I have said that I must be frank. But I do not wish my frankness to be construed as intentional insult. You do not answer, but I shall take it that you have no objection. Your aim I believe to be money—nothing more. Well, I am so fortunate as to be able practically to disregard money. If you should succeed in my case you shall name your own fee. If you fail you receive nothing. So much for money. As regards method I propose to leave that to you. Succeed, and I do not care—I shall not even ask—what trickery you have employed to become successful. You may tell me, if you like, that you have succeeded by pure magic. I shall not contradict you. I shall pay. I may say that I have consulted a physician—he said I had suffered from hallucinations. I paid him and went to a brain specialist. He said my brain was not at fault, and recommended an oculist. The oculist explained that my eyes were perfect, and recommended a scientist. I thought I could safely leave science out of the question—and on the recommendation of Sir John Tenalton I came to you. You will see that I am a sceptic—but one with no other wish than to be, let us say, allayed with a success. If, on those terms, you can accept me as a client I will tell you my story." He paused, waiting.
The inscrutable man opposite did not move or relax his gaze.
"Proceed," he said, sibilantly. And Lord Dynellen continued.
"The winter which has just ended I spent in North Africa," he said, "in Egypt and Morocco. It was in Morocco that I first saw the—the mirage which I intend to describe to you. Altogether, I saw it four times—once in Morocco, three times in Egypt. On each occasion I was riding in the desert—each time alone. The first time I was riding out to a village, and about half-way there I saw a mirage. In itself, as you probably know, that is nothing worthy of note. But in this case the mirage, vision, hallucination, or what you choose to call it, was extraordinarily distinct. One saw nothing behind the mirage, you understand. It was more real, more tangible—as though one were looking at an enormous painting. The mirage pictures a small oasis—just a clump of palms, with a well in the centre. At the well was standing a girl holding a pitcher of water. She seemed to be looking straight out of the mirage at me. She was extraordinarily beautiful, little more than a child, and there was a strange wistful look on her face. She seemed to be so close to me that I could see the colour of her eyes. I think I just stood and stared for a moment, and then quite suddenly the mirage disappeared. I rode back to my hotel, haunted by a perfect child-face and a pair of brown eyes. Never from that hour to this has the picture of that girl been out of my mind. I tell you I am haunted. Three times in different places has that vision appeared to me, and I say to you that I am mad for that girl." Dynellen's composure gave way, an J he stood up, beating his hand on the ebony table, his grey eyes blazing back the fixed, hypnotic stare of the medium. "Find her for me, man, find her if there is such a girl in existence, and take your pay at your own estimate. I see her in the light of day—in the darkness of night. If I sleep I can see her in my dreams. Look at me—see what it has made of me—ordinarily a reserved, unemotional, reasonably self-controlled man. Yet I come here to this purple room of yours and tell you things that I never dreamed I should tell any man."
He sat down again, impulsively as he had stood up.
"Well," he said, "what can you do for me?"
Mesmer moved at last. He put out his white, sinuous hand in a slow, graceful, serpentine sort of gesture.
"I can show her to you now if you will compose your mind and concentrate your thoughts solely upon her!" He smiled, a little wearily. "You introduced yourself to me very heroically. It was not necessary—but we will forget that."
From a drawer in the table before him he took a phial and a tiny glass. All his movements had that queer, slow, lulling graceful quality. He filled the glass with a milky-looking liquid from the phial.
"Drink this," he said. "It is nothing but a very harmless opiate. It will help you to compose yourself." His musical voice soothed like a good woman's caress.
Lord Dynellen drank without hesitation. Mesmer pressed a button on the arm of his "throne," and two of the curtains at the side of the room parted, disclosing a huge moonstone, so large that it must have been a reconstructed one—that is, made up of many stones—in black velvet among hieroglyphics.
Dynellen glanced at it—somehow he seemed reluctant to take his eyes from those of Mesmer. He nodded.
"Of course," he said, vaguely and a trifle drowsily.
"Concentrate your thoughts upon the maid of the mirage," came the rich, lulling voice of the medium. There was a pause, during which Mesmer's gaze fastened on that of his client with a cold and snakelike intensity. Suddenly the medium spoke again—and in a different tone.
"Look at me! Look! With all your soul!"
The sentence came keen and biting like the whistle of a sword-blade, and Dynellen stiffened suddenly. Then, within two seconds, came a new order. "Your mind is tranquil—look into the moonstone!"
Dynellen turned his head rigidly, facing the moonstone.
"You see palms set about a desert well," said Mesmer, in a voice of singular authority. "Describe those palms."
Quickly, but with astonishing confidence, Dynellen detailed the trees, while the hypnotist sketched on a pad of paper before him.
In a few minutes Dynellen ceased speaking and the curt, knife-edged voice of the medium whipped out again.
"Set among the palms is a well. Describe it—quickly!"
Again the swift details and the flicker of the pencil on the pad.
"There is a girl at the well holding a pitcher of water. Look well upon her, for she is beautiful. Tell me her beauties."
Dynellen swayed forward, as it were, yearning towards the picture he seemed to see in the moonstone. He began to speak, but queerly, his voice had become more caressing, more gentle, tender.
"Her eyes are brown and kind and soft, with flecks of gold in them, and they are wistful eyes and honest." He paused for a moment gazing, rapt, at the moonstone, a little smile on his firm lips.
He paused for a moment gazing, rapt, at the moonstone.
"Her nose is straight and small, with delicate nostrils, and her mouth is like a sweet red flower. The lips are curved like rose-petals, and smile—only they droop, they droop like a child's lips when it is near tears. I see her teeth, and they are white and regular. Her chin is round and her neck is like the stem of a lily. Her hair is brown and comes down in curls. And she is little and sweet and lovely."
Dynellen ceased again, gazing like a man under a spell. Mesmer smiled a little and asked more questions. Her ears, her eyebrows, her hands, her garments, the pitcher, what were they like? Then, suddenly, he slid his pad and pencil into a drawer and relaxed his stare, pressing the button in his chair. The curtains fell over the shimmering moonstone and Dynellen suddenly started up, precisely like a man waking from sleep.
"Really I beg your pardon," he said, slightly confused. "I—I dropped off. It must have been that confounded opiate you gave me. I should have explained that I am quite unused to—drinks of any kind. I am a cold-water man—by taste, not necessarily by principle."
"It hardly matters—I guessed as much. You were overcome for a few minutes only," explained Mesmer.
A gleam of suspicion flickered in Dynellen's eyes for a second, but the hypnotist's next words quenched it.
"I did not regret it," he said, a sort of careless frankness in his mellow voice. "It gave me an opportunity to look up several cases similar to yours in a certain volume—which I have reason to value, but which you (without any reason but prejudice) would consider either fabulous or worthless."
Dynellen said nothing, but the suspicion died out of his eyes.
"And now, please listen to me," continued Mesmer, more gravely. "The appearance of this mirage, vision, or what you choose to call it, is not accidental. It is the work of certain malignant spirits which we students of the spirit world, of the occult, term diakkas. And the sending of these visions is one of their methods of teasing or, to use a better word, 'baiting' living people. Somewhere in existence in the world the girl whose spirit you saw in the mirage lives the life of an ordinary material human being. In some way her spirit has fallen under the spell of these diakkas, and when she sleeps or is unconscious in the sense that her mind does not control her body her spirit is being exploited by the diakkas. I am using the simplest possible language to explain in order that you may follow what I say. The intelligence of these diakkas is very little higher than that of a jackdaw or a malicious monkey. Their chief desire seems to be to annoy, irritate, and if possible pain ordinary mortals. Possibly by chance they have discovered that the appearance of this particular girl to you is able to afflict you with the suffering of disappointment. So they delight in sending it to you. Beyond their desire to inflict pain, these elemental have no motive; they are not sufficiently developed for that. And if once you can find the girl and she becomes your wife, or she possesses no charm for you, then obviously they lose their hold over you. They can no longer inflict this especial suffering upon you, and probably they will abandon their hold over her spirit in favour of some new delight which may have attracted their mischievous attention."
Dynellen smiled a little.
"I see that you do not believe me, although you cannot offer any other explanation. Very well, I shall find this girl for you. I am the only man in the world who can find her. And to find her I must send my spirit across the wastes of the spirit world. And my spirit is not unknown to the diakkas of which I have spoken." His voice began to vibrate strangely, and his big black eyes dilated until they seemed to burn with an eerie and awe-inspiring light. "You smile in your heart, you disbelieve; but you would not dare if you knew a tenth of the things I know. I say to you now that my spirit has been hounded by demons across the haunted desolation of that strange region in which the spirits have their abode as a wolf-pack hunts a deer across the steppes of Russia or the frozen plains of the great North-West. The diakkas play with you. But I say"—he rose and his eyes blazed—"I say that there are things ravening across that demon-ridden world to which the diakkas are no more comparable than butterflies to vampires. The diakkas to these are less than jackals to tigers, and they hate me—and fear me—because of the things I know and the power I have snatched. You who know only this little world know nothing of that unfathomable region. Ah!"—he controlled himself suddenly with superb gesture and continued in a slow, cold voice that dragged like a trailed rope—"it is folly to endeavour to describe the spirit world to one whose spirit has not traversed it. I, Mesmer, who have passed through the Tract of the Elementals, surveyed the Valley of the Vampires, seen from afar the Craters of the Unicorns, skirted the Ranges of the Werewolves, and have even entered and passed through the Red Fogs of the Tentacle Spirits, say that I can win you your mirage maiden—take her from the grip of the diakkas. You smile, believing I risk nothing, assured that I shall turn some little wheel of trickery only to bring her to you." He leaned across the table, his full gaze on Dynellen. "I must have some belief—some trust. I tell you I go to fearful peril on your mission. You believe I take no risk. Listen! I will disembody your spirit and my own, and we will search the regions I have told you of in company."
He stared questioningly at the other. But Lord Dynellen smiled faintly.
"No," he said, definitely.
Mesmer's eyes lighted.
"Then you believe—now?"
Dynellen shook his head.
"I do not go quite so far as that," he said, frankly. "But I feel—quite suddenly—that I do not care to challenge the mysterious powers of darkness at which you have hinted. An hour ago I should have laughed at the idea."
Mesmer sat down.
"That is not faith; it is fear," he said.
Dynellen's face hardened a little.
"Be it so," he said, coldly. "If that is any satisfaction to the denizens of the spirit world I will not refuse it to them. I am more urgently concerned with my reputation for courage or otherwise among men." He was a V.C. among other things, and was sure of himself in any material world.
Mesmer nodded and pressed a button on the arm of the throne. "Come again to me in seven days from now," he said, and his assistant appeared through the curtains.
Dynellen took his hat, rose, and left the apartment.
When presently Ermond returned Mesmer handed him a rough pencil sketch, a few notes, and a list of names.
"That lady is little, young, with brown eyes and brown hair, child-like, wistful, and very pretty. We have to find her—or some one exactly like her. Inquire at the photographic firms who make a speciality of taking people on the stage, and at the artist's model agents. I will see other firms myself."
The assistant took the slips with a nod and went out.
Four mornings later Mesmer brought home a photograph and a negative.
"This is she," he said to his assistant—"Alison Dene—an artist's model."
Ermond looked at the portrait—and, indeed, it was a very lovely face that he saw.
"The other prints are all ready. Shall I get on with this one?"
Mesmer nodded, and went out to the motor that was waiting to take him to visit a wealthy miser at Hampstead, who latterly had been distressed with an idea that spirits were stealing sovereigns from a chestful of those coins he kept by him.
Ermond took the negative of the girl called Alison Dene into a work-room upstairs and began to prepare a print from it. It was not an ordinary print—the process seemed too intricate, involving the use of gum and other queer-seeming materials. But in the end he produced a print which seemed to satisfy him, for he put it with a dozen other prints, slipped a rubber band round the packet, and left it on Mesmer's ebony table.
That night, in response to an urgent telephone call, Lord Dynellen came again to the purple room. He was less at ease, less sure of himself now than when he first came. A reluctant deference seemed to tinge his tone when he addressed the white-faced clairvoyant.
Mesmer lost no time in by-play for effect.
"I have taken a number of spirit photographs for you, Lord Dynellen," he said, "and I hope that one of them may prove to be the one we want. Will you look through them?" He handed the packet of prints, and Dynellen, with hands that trembled slightly, went through them. The prints were very vague—one had to look closely to be sure that they were more than a whitish blur on a dark background.
But suddenly Dynellen stopped at one, with an exclamation.
"This—this one," he said, pale and eager. "This is she!"
Mesmer smiled gravely.
It was the picture of Alison Dene.
"Good," said Mesmer, and swept the other photographs into a waste-paper basket. "You are fortunate—the chances were a million to one that the picture of this maid of the mirage would not be among the photographs. And, to-night, I go again into the spirit world and find her."
"May I take this photograph?" asked Dynellen.
Mesmer nodded.
"Come again in three evenings from now at eleven o'clock," he said. "I shall send a message."
"Without fail," replied Dynellen, and went, taking the precious photograph with him.
That was a red-letter day for Alison Dene. To the toiling, desperately poor little artist's model, Maximilian Mesmer had appeared like a fairy uncle. She was the daughter of a small doctor who had struggled for the first fifteen years of his career to pay his way, and had just reached a period when he was hoping, by strict economy, to be able to insure his life for a few hundreds as some sort of provision for his wife and daughter, in the event of his decease, when he died. The sale of the practice paid the debts, and Mrs. Dene and Alison were left to live or starve according to what they could make of the life they had to face. They had enough left over to buy a microscopic annuity—some shillings a week. And they had settled down to existence in two tiny rooms in Chelsea—with Mrs. Dene dressmaking for a pittance and Alison sitting for the face. They just lived—there was nothing left over for extras. Illness would have ruined them.
Alison, at nineteen, had endured a year of this, and was beginning to forget how to laugh when Mesmer first appeared on the scene.
Like most other unprotected pretty girls in London, Alison Dene was well-used to the overtures of strange men, and equally skilled in defending herself from them, but Mesmer came in very different guise from that of the ordinary woman-hunter of London.
She saw at once that this was not a man to fear and avoid in the sense that most of the strangers were to be avoided. He came like power incarnate, lie desired to see her mother. He was kind but very urgent.
She took him to her mother and left them together. She felt she had never seen a man she could trust more than this still-faced, strong, quiet man.
Mesmer looked at the mother, learned—it was an easy lesson—their circumstances, and told her as much of the truth as he deemed necessary. One can understand the heart-breaking eagerness of the worn woman easily enough. She, too, knew instantly that whatever else Mesmer was he was too aloof, too remote, too great, to steal a girl for common motives. She trusted him after ten words. Women always trusted Mesmer.
When Alison returned she learned that she was to dine with Mesmer that night. A motor would be sent for her. She flushed and remembered how to laugh.
"You are not afraid to trust her to me?" said Mesmer, on leaving. Mrs. Dene laughed a little, also.
"Afraid?" she said. "No. Eagles do not kill wrens." For she was a woman of some imagination.
So Alison Dene dined with Mesmer.
Certainly she was very sweet and lovely and dainty. How it had endured through the bitter days was a mystery. It seemed at first that she had come through the poverty and all unscathed, but Mesmer knew better when, after dinner, he told her of Dynellen.
"Of course I will marry him," she said, wide-eyed, her little, beautiful hands clasped together very earnestly. "I know he is good and a gentleman. One of the artists I sit for painted him once and told me all about him. How can I do anything else? There are a thousand endings to the life my mother and I live now, but no ending like this."
"But—love? Most girls would want love—or a substitute for love," said Mesmer, curiously.
The brown eyes opened wide.
"Love!" echoed the girl. "What right have I to ask for the luxury of loving—even to be loved? Why, there have been a hundred times when I have cried for food—for warmth—cried myself to sleep for it. Why, I would not dare to ask for more than that—for my mother and for myself. I am too poor to think of love. You say that I shall be loved, and perhaps—in a hundred years—I shall learn to be greedy enough to try to win myself the pleasure of loving someone besides my mother."
A sudden little pang pierced through the steel of the man opposite. He, too, had known poverty of the kind she described, but it had never been strong enough to grind one spark of hope out of his iron soul. But he was a man—and strong beyond most men. With this frail girl, who had so miraculously saved her beauty through that life of penury, it was different. It was bound to be different. Love! Ah! that was something fabulous—out of reach. Food and warmth—give her these and she would not be greedy. Love—the inheritance of every woman—love must go. She was too humble to ask for that.
Mesmer saw sudden tears brim the eyes that looked so bravely into his, and on the impulse he rose and slipped his arm round her shoulder, as though she were his daughter.
"Little Alison," he said, softly, "try not to be bitter. You are going to be very happy soon. You will love Lord Dynellen before you know. Forget all the old life—it was hard, but it's all gone now. You will see—I, Mesmer, who know about these things, say so to you."
Her hands flew to her face and she began to cry softly. Some woman's instinct had assured her of the absolute truth there was in all that Mesmer had said—why, the phrases rang with truth. She was to attain even the luxury of loving, then!
Mesmer left her for a little to cry—she would learn many things in her weeping.
Presently he returned and began to school her for the meeting with Dynellen.
It took place—two nights later—in the purple room at eleven o'clock, with Mesmer carefully seating Dynellen in a comfortable chair at one end of the room facing the dark funereal curtains at the other end.
"No matter what happens," said Mesmer earnestly. "No matter what you hear, or see, do not move from the chair until I bid you."
It occurred to Dynellen that the medium was intensely pale and that his eyes were superhumanly bright. He seemed nervous, ill at ease.
"What is the matter with you?" he asked.
"I am playing with fire," said Mesmer, in a low voice, chalking a six-sided ring round the chair which Dynellen occupied. Dynellen did not answer, but sat watching the other complete a number of mysterious preparations—all of which seemed to be directed towards one end, that of protecting Dynellen from some danger hitherto unknown to him. It ended with the hanging before him, so that it stretched completely across the room, of a curtain of the thinnest possible gauze, into which, here and there, was worked a strange-looking hieroglyphic. From the gauze, as it was unfolded, arose a queer sharp aromatic smell, mingled with the pungent odour of wild garlic.
Dynellen noted that the censer was burning strongly. The apartment began to reek of incense. Then suddenly all the lights went out save one tiny electric bulb heavily shaded, which disseminated so feeble a light that practically the room was in darkness. Gradually Dynellen's eyes became accustomed to the gloom, and he fancied he saw the black outline of Mesmer pass swiftly and silently across the room to a large cabinet at the side, and disappear into it. Then followed a silence—complete, profound, and unearthly. Had Dynellen not known that he was in a room in the heart of London he might well have imagined himself back in the soundless desert. His scalp began to prick and tingle.
Suddenly on that numb silence exploded a chain of sounds. It seemed to come from the centre of the room, and resembled the sound that would be made by a number of bare-footed boys jumping down on to a carpet one after another—a series of soft, muffled thuds. Dynellen, peering through his gauze had a queer fancy that the room was full of moving shadows—smoky, swirling shadows that were never still. They seemed to come pressing up to the gauze, to peer in—once he thought he caught a gleam of eyes staring through at him.
And it was no longer silent. The room rustled and whispered intangibly. Then something with hoofs stamped fearfully so that the whole building seemed to shake—a fierce hissing issued from the cabinet and Dynellen was aware of the fanning of huge wings. He was sure that they were wings—he felt the air displaced by them striking against his face.
And then he became conscious of fear. The room was evil—was full of evil things. Vaguely he was aware that something desperate was happening in and around the cabinet.
Somebody cried "Ah! Ah!" in clear, sharp, piercing tones, which died away in fretful muttering. Dynellen's blood ran cold as he fancied he recognized the voice of Mesmer.
Then came a laugh—bitter, sinister, inexpressibly evil. It was joined by others, and the dreadful mirth was swelling to a raucously-triumphant climax when in an instant it stopped dead—as though the thing which had laughed had laughed prematurely. There was a silence that lasted a full minute—a silence heavy with a sense of expectancy, of sinister waiting. Even the wings that seemed to winnow the air ceased for a moment. The silence was broken again—something snarled and ran right across the room with quick, heavy steps. A faint greenish light flashed up as it went, and Dynellen saw the thing plainly. It looked like a very large hound—it touched the gauze as it passed Dynellen, fell back with a thick and awful scream, precisely as if the gauze had been white-hot, and disappeared leaving an acrid smell of singed hide behind.
In the silence which followed it occurred to Dynellen that the evil-seeming had gone from the room. The moving shadows were gone and the wings had ceased fanning.
An atmosphere of peace had come to the room again.
Then the heart of the man behind the gauze stood still. The remaining light had gone out suddenly, and the room was in black darkness. But only for a second. It seemed to the watcher that the darkness at the far end was clearing. It came away, as it were, layer by layer, and slowly, seeming to dawn under dark, rose a picture—a picture of palms towering, far off, an islet of trees, set in the centre of a flat, illimitable yellow desert.
The oasis of the mirage!
Dynellen was sure of it—his heart began to race, pounding. The picture seemed to draw nearer. The palms grew larger, taller—he could no longer see their heavily-fronded heads. But it was not for the palms that he looked. It was for the well beneath them—the well and the girl of the well.
A sheen of white flickered in the middle of the oasis, as the greyness still before the vision lifted little by little—the speck of white grew to a garment—and the wearer of the garment was a woman!
Dynellen leaned forward intently. He was whispering to himself—a sort of desperate prayer.
Then, all suddenly, the mirage ceased to approach; the last greyness vanished, and the vision set in gold of the sun, barred here and there with heavy shadows of the palm trunks, hung before him, precisely as he had seen it in the desert, only clearer, more real.
And the girl at the well was the maid of the desert mirage—standing in beauty, looking out upon him with wistful, wonderful eyes. Dynellen half rose in his seat, remembered that Mesmer had made no sign, and, with an effort, reseated himself.
Then, suddenly, the girl raised her arms, reaching them out to him in a gesture of appeal. Dynellen leaped to his feet, and the voice of Mesmer issued from the cabinet like the sound of a very musical but softly muffled bell.
"Take the child!"
Dynellen lifted the gauze like a man in a dream, stepping down the apartment. He dared not believe that this was real—he moved with one hand protectingly thrust out before him as though fearing to strike the wall that he knew would be behind the vision.
He dared not believe that this was real—
he moved with one hand protectingly thrust out
before him as though fearing to strike the wall
that he knew would be behind the vision.
He drew nearer, softly, rapt—now he could see the golden light in the wide brown eyes—nearer still, both hands before him now. Falteringly, not daring to believe, he reached out to touch the beautiful little hands that appealed to him—touched them, and uttered a cry that was like a sob. They were real! He moved to her blindly—warm arms slid tenderly round his neck, a sweet face was pressed to his cheek, and he was aware of soft scented hair in his eyes. He held her close.
"I dared not believe—I dared not believe," he whispered brokenly.
Their lips met in the darkness.
An instant later a subdued light shone out from a rose-shaded electric bulb, and Dynellen saw with a strange sense of shock that they were standing in the middle of the room which his visits to Mesmer had made familiar to him. All was as usual—the heavy purple curtains hung down each wall, the ebony table, the "throne"—everything was in its place, even to Mesmer, who sat in his big chair, smiling gravely at them.
Suddenly Dynellen felt the girl in his arms go limp. He looked down—her sweet face had grown pale, and her lids had fallen. She had fainted. In an instant Mesmer was at her side.
"It is nothing," he said. "You must be wise—leave her to me." He took her, and bore her light as a rose-leaf from that room to the apartment adjoining, where her mother awaited her.
Lord Dynellen sat down, his mind whirling, his soul radiant. Presently Mesmer returned to him. Dynellen noted that all his air of mystery was gone. He was smiling as a man of the world smiles.
"She is waiting for you—she wishes to tell you everything—to explain the—trickery," he said. Then his smile died out and, very earnestly, he added:—
"Lord Dynellen, you will have to decide. A man does not mate with a spirit—that child is not from the land of the spirits, but from the land of mortals. But I warn you that you may search for such another for the whole of a lifetime and not find her. Go to her now—forget the maid of the mirage—and be very thankful that you have found so sweet a substitute."
An hour later, Mesmer, watching from a window commanding a view of the street, saw three people leave the house and enter Dynellen's motor—a woman, a man, and a girl.
The girl looked up at Dynellen as he handed her into the car, and by the light of a street lamp the watcher saw plain on her face, shining in her eyes, that which seemed to well content him—the dawn of love. And Dynellen's gaze as he looked down at her was one of adoration.
When, a month later, on the day following their marriage, Mesmer received a handsome cheque from Dynellen there was a note enclosed with it. It ran:—
"I have come to see that—in my case at any rate—trickery can only be judged by its result. And its result for me is happiness more perfect than I had dreamed it possible to obtain. We are very content to have been so tricked.
"Dynellen."
Mesmer looked at the cheque and smiled. It paid for the bioscope effects which Ermond working in the adjoining room—divided from Mesmer's only by a white screen—had been able to produce. It paid for the concealed assistants who had produced the strange "spirit" noises—for the hire of the trained hound—for all. And there was a margin that still ran into four figures.
"A matrimonial agent could have done it more cheaply," said Mesmer, lightly, "but it would have been devoid of charm."
And it is probable that Lord Dynellen would have been the first to agree with him.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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