Campton was seized with a sudden deep compassion for all these women groping for a ray of light in the blackness. It moved him to think of Mme. de Tranlay’s proud figure climbing a clairvoyante’s stairs.
“I’ll come if you want me to,” he said.
They drove to the Batignolles quarter. Mrs. Brant’s lips were twitching under her veil, and as the motor stopped she said childishly: “I’ve never been to this kind of place before.”
“I should hope not,” Campton rejoined. He himself, during the Russian lady’s rule, had served an apprenticeship among the soothsayers, and come away disgusted with the hours wasted in their company. He suddenly remembered the Spanish girl in the little white house near the railway, who had told his fortune in the hot afternoons with cards and olive-stones, and had found, by irrefutable signs, that he and she would “come together” again. “Well, it was better than this pseudo-scientific humbug,” he mused, “because it was picturesque—and so was she—and she believed in it.”
Mrs. Brant rang, and Campton followed her into a narrow hall. A servant-woman showed them into a salon which was as commonplace as a doctor’s waiting-room. On the mantelpiece were vases of Pampas grass, and a stuffed monkey swung from the electrolier. Evidently Mme. Olida was superior to the class of fortune-tellers who prepare a special stage-setting, and no astrologer’s robe or witch’s kitchen was to be feared.
The maid led them across a plain dining-room into an inner room. The shutters were partly closed, and the blinds down. A voluminous woman in loose black rose from a sofa. Gold earrings gleamed under her oiled black hair—and suddenly, through the billows of flesh, and behind the large pale mask, Campton recognized the Spanish girl who used to read his fortune in the house by the railway. Her eyes rested a moment on Mrs. Brant; then they met his with the same heavy stare. But he noticed that her hands, which were small and fat, trembled a little as she pointed to two chairs.
“Sit down, please,” she said in a low rough voice, speaking in French. The door opened again, and a young man with Levantine eyes and a showy necktie looked in. She said sharply: “No,” and he disappeared. Campton noticed that a large emerald flashed on his manicured hand. Mme. Olida continued to look at her visitors.
Mrs. Brant wiped her dry lips and stammered: “We’re his parents—a son at the front....”
Mme. Olida fell back in a trance-like attitude, let her lips droop over her magnificent eyes, and rested her head against a soiled sofa-pillow. Presently she held out both hands.
“You are his parents? Yes? Give me each a hand, please.” As her cushioned palm touched Campton’s he thought he felt a tremor of recognition, and saw, in the half-light, the tremor communicate itself to her lids. He grasped her hand firmly, and she lifted her eyes, looked straight into his with her heavy velvety stare, and said: “You should hold my hand more loosely; the currents must not be compressed.” She turned her palm upward, so that his finger-tips rested on it as if on a keyboard; he noticed that she did not do the same with the hand she had placed in Mrs. Brant’s.