The young man leaned forward again, and laid his hand on the warm haunches of the ebony sphinx with a movement of slight defiance.
"Listen," he said, "please, sir, and I'll do my best to tell you exactly what has happened since we spoke of this subject last."
He steadied himself to his task, trying to keep his narrative circumstantial and restrained, to offer nothing more than a bald statement of fact. But the charm of it, once he had started, was a little too much for him. His speech grew lyrical against his will. And Mr. Rivers listened, his eyes closed, his brow drawn into hard lines by the effort of attention. Once he held up his hand.
"Did you question this appearance?" he asked.
"It was useless," Laurence answered, with a queer break in his voice. "She never spoke—that is in words. She was dumb."
"That is unfortunate," Mr. Rivers said coldly. "Well, pray, go on."
And Laurence obeyed; recounting, with but slight reservation, all, even to the events of the last few hours, when he and his sweet companion had vainly sought to reach each other in defiance of some mighty, opposing force, and how, at the crucial moment of the struggle, Mr. Rivers's summons had come.
"There, sir," said he finally—"now you have it all as far as I can give it you. I don't attempt to explain, though I may have my own ideas on the subject. I've tried to put it quite honestly before you, and must leave you to thrash the meaning out of it for yourself."
For some little space the sick man remained silent; then he raised both hands and let them sink back upon the coverlet with the gesture of one who bids farewell to hope.
"Fables!" he said bitterly; "fables! I ask bread of you and you give me a stone. I offer you an unprecedented opportunity of psychological study, and you approach it in the spirit of a ballad-monger or a mountebank! I require from you close observation, scientific acumen, an unrelenting pursuit of truth; and you put me off with some old wives' tale of lost letters, the ravings of an hysterical girl, of re-incarnation, multiple identity, and I know not what farrago of sickly sentiment and outworn superstition! You trouble me with rubbish, which it would be an impertinence to offer as material for serious consideration to a peasant's child, of ordinary mental capacity, in a modern board-school. Nor can I, my dear Laurence, acquit you of insincerity, since you trick out this unworthy stuff in the extravagant language of an erotic poem, while claiming for yourself an attitude wholly platonic and superior to animal passion."