CHAPTER XIV
For twenty years had Kingston Darnley awaited the call that was to come to him from Isabel. He had made no effort to anticipate, or even to summon, the voice that he desired. It seemed to him better, finer, more loyal, to do nothing, to sit patient until the course of life should bring him again into touch with what he had lost. At the appointed moment the voice would reach him, and he would know it. But till that time should come, his soul revolted against the notion of going out into the devious byways of foolishness to call up the departed with necromancy or any other prevailing fad. For all such illegitimate dealings with the third-rate dead he had the strongest contempt; it would be a profanity to attempt such proceedings in relation to Isabel; wherever she was, she must be above those hireling spirits who go out in attendance on séances and circles. So for many years he maintained his resolution to be patient, and stiffened himself in disdain of cheap and common spiritualistic methods. He had no idea that people of any sense or breeding could find solace in futilities so apparent. Gundred was his standard by whom he judged all other women’s pretensions; and Gundred had, not so much a contempt as a rooted religious horror, immitigable, medieval, of magic, palmistry, psychometry—all the many names beneath which we disguise our curious longing to pry behind the veil. The very notion of such things made Gundred so piously angry that a certain reluctant, stifled belief could be guessed to underlie and inspire her denunciations. Meanwhile, however, her attitude confirmed Kingston in his, and he remained quiescent, until at last he came across Mrs. Mercer-Laporte.
Mrs. Mercer-Laporte was dining with Mrs. Mimburn when Kingston and Gundred met her, having accepted their aunt’s invitation as a solemn but displeasing bi-annual duty. Gundred made a point of never evading it; Gundred made a point of never enjoying it. Minne-Adélaïde, however, with the years, had grown less flagrant; but the change made her no less odious than before to Gundred, for her love of the illicit had now turned from matters of the flesh to the darker mysteries of occultism, clairvoyance, ghost-raising. She had taken to frequenting circles, to entertaining phantoms, to wearing weird, shapeless clothes, and collecting round herself a crowd of people famous in the ‘psychic’ world. And of these Mrs. Mercer-Laporte was the fine flower, the most exalted, the most spiritual, the choicest in ways and manners.
She was almost obtrusively lady-like, tall and pale, and mild and bland, in long trailing draperies of blue. She had sweet anæmic features, and a watery eye that suffused with tears on the slightest occasion. Her hair was thin and sandy, coiled into a knob on the top of her narrow head; her mouth was large, lax, emotional; her glances soulful and celestial. She wore a quantity of mystical-looking chains and necklaces that gleamed and jingled as she languished from place to place with a certain priestly elegance. She fell to Kingston’s lot at dinner, and during the first part of the meal he felt himself truly unfortunate. At last, however, a chance word caught his attention and held it.
‘Ah, my dear Mr. Merrington,’ he heard her saying to her other neighbour in high dulcet tones—‘dear, dear Mr. Merrington, believe me, I have often had the sweetest converse with my dear dead.’ She sighed, as if in rapture, while Mr. Merrington helped himself to a cutlet in aspic. ‘They return to those that love them, Mr. Merrington,’ she went on, as soon as the cutlet had been safely landed. ‘I never feel that my dear ones have been lost. They are always near one—it only needs a suitable medium to produce them. Oh, of course, I am not talking of silly common séances. Those spirits are people one would not wish to have anything to do with; but, ah! the sweet and holy talks I have had with my own beloved ones in suitable surroundings.’
At this point, seeing Mr. Merrington more favourably inclined towards the cutlet than the conversation, Kingston thought he might be allowed to take part in the talk.
‘One always feels,’ he said, ‘that from all accounts the spirits that return must be those of exceedingly weak-minded people. The messages they make so much ado about conveying are invariably such rubbish.’
Mrs. Mercer-Laporte turned the watery gleam of her smile upon him. ‘What is matter?’ she asked hierophantically. ‘Ah, Mr. Darnley, what does matter matter? Believe me, you have been unfortunate in the spirits you have met. In the innumerable vibrations of the Universe there are rays innumerable that permeate the Whole with their blessed dew, and consume in their pure radiance all the coarser manifestations of matter. You speak without that inward higher knowledge which makes us one with the Infinite, in those far Universes where the Veil of matter exists no longer, and the blessed dead are free and untrammelled by any more cares of this vulgar flesh!’ Mrs. Mercer-Laporte stopped to take breath, and in an abstraction allowed herself to be given an artichoke. Then, while she was unconsciously devouring it, Kingston took advantage of the pause in her oration to recall her to the question that interested him.
‘Then,’ he said, ‘soberly and without mistake, are you really sure that we can ever converse with our own friends in other states of existence?’