But Mrs. Mercer-Laporte made a profession of irrelevance. In her world it was the hall-mark of wisdom, the guarantee of occult knowledge to which the profane crowd can never attain. She would not have lowered her pretensions by sticking to the point.
‘Go,’ she said majestically, waving an inspired fork, ‘go to dearest Mr. Minch in Albany Road—49, Albany Road, Mr. Darnley; Albany Road in Notting Hill, remember. Go to him, Mr. Darnley, and be made happy. How all of us, bound down in this sphere of matter, how we leap and burn to attain the higher levels through which for ever the blessed ones are wandering on their angel wings! Ah, rapture, rapture, Mr. Darnley! Go, go to Mr. Minch.’
Twaddling and silly as her utterances were, yet the woman was obviously sincere. Kingston had never met the type before, and now he saw that it was not quite so cheap and contemptible as he had always imagined. Predisposed by his secret longings, he prepared to lend a favourable ear, and the dulled sobriety of his middle-aged calm began to break up unexpectedly into a St. Martin’s summer of youthful enthusiasm.
‘What does Mr. Minch do?’ he asked.
‘Do?’ replied Mrs. Mercer-Laporte. ‘He draws the pearl from the Secret Lotus! He will tell you your heart’s desire. He will tell you of the sweet spirits hovering round you. He can see them all easily, and the colour of your own soul’s halo he will tell you too. Sometimes it is pink and sometimes it is blue. Mine,’ she added with pride, ‘is purple. No one but me has a purple halo, Mr. Darnley. But every one of us has a colour of our own, and dear Mr. Minch sees them distinctly and clearly, and tells you all about them, and about the dear spirits as well. And then, if there is anyone among them, anyone in the precious company of the invisible with whom you particularly wish to enter into sweet converse, Mr. Darnley, you might go on to Mr. Muddock at Hindhead. Mention my name, though, just to show that you have a reverend and faithful spirit. Mr. Muddock has the most marvellous powers. He is more than a mere psychometrist. He can actually make the dead resume the garb of flesh, Mr. Darnley!’ perorated Mrs. Mercer-Laporte with awful solemnity.
Suddenly Kingston’s resolve of twenty years weakened and broke. The long odds were that this talk of spirits was the mere nonsense he had always believed it. But still there could be no possible harm in trying to find out. And if, in sober truth, Isabel were really hovering on the edge of the other world, perpetually longing to enter into communication with him again, how tragically foolish to neglect the blessed opportunity because of any stupid materialistic qualm of incredulity. After all, there might be something in it. In the avowed belief that there was nothing, and the secret trust that there might be a great deal, he resolved that he would go and see the wonderful Mr. Minch. He intimated his decision to Mrs. Mercer-Laporte. The sibyl showed much mystic rapture.
‘Ah,’ she said, ‘sweet and holy, sweet and holy. The blessed ones are waiting for you, Mr. Darnley, I feel convinced of it. I almost think I see one near you now, but alas, I have not quite reached the percipient plane as yet. But do go to dear Mr. Minch, and he will tell you her name and all about her, and what she wants to say to you. I have had the strangest, most marvellous experiences myself. My own sweet sister Margaret is always hovering round me, Mr. Darnley. She died when she was only six days old, and grew up in the spirit world. I recognised her distinctly, as soon as dear Mr. Minch described her.... Golden hair, he said, tall, blue eyes, high forehead, graceful figure. Then, to make quite sure, I said, “Does your name begin with M?” and Mr. Minch asked the sweet spirit, and told me it said “Yes.” Then, of course, I knew. “Margaret,” I cried—just like that—“is it Margaret?” And it was Margaret; she had come to tell me that I must go on bravely, and everything would come right. Now, wasn’t that a holy, happy experience, Mr. Darnley? Oh yes, you must go to Mr. Minch. Go to-morrow night at eight. He has a public circle then, and crowds of dear poor creatures go to him for help and comfort, and he heals them all—not only people like you and me, Mr. Darnley, but all the poor sweet cooks and housemaids.’
Kingston was not quite so strongly impressed as Mrs. Mercer-Laporte had hoped by the reappearance of the somewhat immature sister Margaret. Yet, though he derided himself for such weakness, he could no longer resist the absurd temptation to put things to the test. He was quite fixed in his determination to see Mr. Minch, if it were only to laugh at him; and filled up the rest of the evening by cross-examining Mrs. Mercer-Laporte on all the other pink and purple spirits by whom she was apparently accompanied wherever she went. Gundred, who looked on the entertainment as a tiresome duty, calling only for one’s second-best gown, was surprised to see her husband so much amused and interested. When he deliberately went across the room after dinner to sit once more by Mrs. Mercer-Laporte, Gundred was quite startled by such a display of enthusiasm. However, she quickly noticed that Mrs. Mercer-Laporte had pink eyelids and a long bony neck; her astonishment subsided into contemptuous tolerance, and then passed into a pious pity. She thought how nice it was of Kingston to be so unnecessarily kind to the poor thing, perhaps the weirdest of Aunt Minna’s weird collection of guests. Gundred called back her attention to her own behaviour, and set herself once more to giving an example of nice deportment to this mob of people who clearly had no notion what decent clothes or manners might mean.
The least touch destroys a delicate balance, and Mrs. Mercer-Laporte’s rather watery personality it was that had the power, after so many years of hesitation, to decide Kingston upon taking his long-delayed plunge into spiritualistic circles. Little as he might think of Mrs. Mercer-Laporte’s own rhapsodies, they forced upon his mind the reflection that many good and presumably prudent people derive much comfort and sustenance from occult manifestations. With all allowances made for credulity, hysteria, and affectation there yet, it seemed to him suddenly, must remain an irreducible minimum of fact about the ghostly communications which make the consolation of so many sad, lonely lives. The laws that govern life and death are, when all is said and done, so dimly, so doubtfully known and guessed, that bold must be he who dares, on the supposition of impossibility, to deny continued existence and continued volition to the blessed dead. Who was to take it upon himself to say confidently that they cannot return, for reasons that we know not, under natural laws of which we have no more suspicion than had the eighteenth century of those that give us electricity? Seeing the incalculable nature of the soul, the impalpable, mysterious substance of its being, the probabilities that physical death only give it freedom were, on the whole, very great and worthy of respect. Why obstinately mock, for the sake of a few frauds and charlatans, at a deep belief, as old as humanity, which has been held, and is held to this day, by many of the wisest and holiest among men? What claim to wisdom has the stiff-necked attitude of mere negation, based on nothing but ignorant prejudice and the sceptic’s baseless notion of what may or may not be possible to a thing of whose being, and the laws that control it, he knows no more than any enthusiastic believer in apparitions? Why not, then, take the braver, more honest course of inquiring for one’s self into the circumstances of the spirit-world? In any case the inquiry could do no harm; either way, one would gain certainty, instead of the present dreary and unprofitable doubt. And if Isabel’s purified soul were, after all, by some merciful freak of creation, still roaming the world in her lover’s neighbourhood, how utterly, childishly silly not to ascertain the fact and profit by it, in place of continuing deaf to that dear desired voice, out of puerile prejudice and a preconceived notion that such things could not be. Mrs. Mercer-Laporte’s enthusiasm had the effect of forcing all these arguments on Kingston with new and irresistible force. He could hold out no longer; his loneliness could afford to neglect no chances of relief; he would try what consolation the Other World had to offer.
At the very notion fresh interest in life began to animate him. Without any weak cowardice or giving way he had yet, since the tragedy of twenty years before, lost any personal interest in every-day life, its bustle and ambitions. That career into which his mother had hoped so vaguely to push him and support him by the influence of March and Brakelond, had long since faded from the foreground of his mind. When at last Lady Adela gently and imperceptibly passed away, she left her son fairly settled into the position of his wife’s husband. Concentrated on thoughts of that beautiful past, he never again plucked up any enthusiasm for the present or the future. It was not that he was afraid of them, that he had shrinkings or morbid tenderness; they simply failed to interest him any more. He retired into that small secret life of his own, and the world gradually came to look on Mr. Darnley as the pleasant but unnoticeable appendage to Lady Gundred. Comfortably vast as was his income, Brakelond, that insatiable old monster, swallowed it all and gave no thanks. Despite his money, therefore, Kingston soon unconsciously held that subtly meek and subordinate place of a man whose wife it is that owns the estate and the money. He had no wish to assert himself, and even at Ivescar it was Gundred who now held the reins, and concentrated the general gaze upon herself. Now and then she deplored to their friends her husband’s apathy towards the Primrose League, but, on the whole, she had everybody’s agreement when she talked of him as ‘perfectly happy in his library among his books.’ “To be perfectly happy in one’s library among one’s books” is the blessed euphemistic privilege of the obscure rich, and Kingston acquiesced gratefully in his friends’ attitude towards his remoteness from their life and the empty clamours that seemed to fill it. Accustomed long since to his own quiet, inconspicuous path, it was with a kindling of vitality, then, that he contemplated sallying forth into the spirit world. It was a stirring of his old self, an emancipation from the obsession of Gundred’s majesty. Half ashamed, half excited, half contemptuous did Kingston set out to enter into relations with the dead.