What she saw she never remembered. Lucy said it was all nonsense she talked, and, anyhow, she whispered so low that nobody could catch more than a word, except that she seemed to be promising something over and over again. In a little while the conjurer whispered to her, and with a few passes of his hand consciousness returned. She rose, white and shaken, but quite herself again. He bade the two good-bye, and bowed them out with much suavity of manner. Abbie returned not a single word. As they drove home, the maid spoke, “Miss Abbie, Miss Abbie—you won’t go there again, will you?”
“Never,” cried Abbie—“never!”
But the next morning, after a sleepless night, there returned the same horrible, dragging longing to see him; and with the longing came the same fear that had suffocated her will the day before—a fear like the fear of dreams, formless, reasonless, more dreadful than death.
Impelled by this frightful force that did not seem to have anything to do with her, herself, she left the house and boarded a street-car. She felt as if a demon were riding her soul, spurring it wherever he willed. She went to a little park outside the city, frequented by Germans and almost deserted of a week-day. And on her way she remembered that this was what she had promised him to do.
He was waiting to assist her from the car. As he helped her alight, she noticed his hands and his nails. They were neat enough; yet she suddenly recalled Lucy’s words; and suddenly she saw the man, in his tasteless, expensive clothes, with his swagger and the odor of whiskey about him, as any other gentlewoman would have seen him. Her fright had swept all his seer’s glamour away; he was no longer the mystical ruler of the spirit-world; he was a squalid adventurer—and her master!
He made her realize that in five minutes. “You caynt help yourself, Miss Courtlandt,” he said, and she believed him.
Whether it were the influence of a strong will on a hysterical temperament and a morbidly impressible fancy, or whether it were a black power from the unseen, beyond his knowledge but not beyond his abuse, matters little so far as poor Abbie Courtlandt was concerned; on either supposition, she was powerless.
She left him, hating him as only slavery and fear can hate; but she left him pledged to bring him five hundred dollars in the morning and to marry him in the afternoon; and now, having kept her word about the money, she was driving home, clinching in her cold fingers the slip of paper containing the address of a justice of the peace in the suburbs, where she must meet him and be bound to this unclean vulture, who would bear her away from home and kindred and all fair repute and peace.
A passion of revolt shook her. She must meet him? Why must she? Why not tear his address to bits? Why not drive fast, fast home, and tell her mother that she was going to Chicago about some gowns that night? Why not stay there at Jack’s, and let this fiend, who harried her, wait in vain? She twisted the paper and ground her teeth; yet she knew that she shouldn’t tear it, just as we all know we shall not do the frantic things that we imagine, even while we are finishing up the minutest details the better to feign ourselves in earnest. Poor, weak Abbie knew that she never would dare to confess her plight to her people. No, she could never endure another family council of war.
“There is only one way,” she muttered. Instead of tearing the paper she read it: