“Madame Zairoff is a great deal more than that,” said Colonel Estcourt; “she is one of its most earnest students and most ardent votaries. If you knew half of her marvellous powers you would congratulate yourselves upon being permitted to receive her, unless, indeed,” he added, with a questioning glance at the beautiful woman beside him, “she has a fancy to make converts.”
The men became eager of entreaties to her so made, but the women held back a little.
Princess Zairoff, however, assured them she had no intention of proselytising. “It is quite true I am deeply interested in this subject,” she said, “but I should be sorry to bore you all with my views, or the reasons for my holding those views. Psychic inquiry demands a great deal more than cursory study. There are many mysteries of nature that men have looked upon as enigmas, until patience and research have solved them for them. Then they marvel how they could have been blind so long! Magnetism, spiritualism, and clairvoyance have all their mystical, as well as their explicable, side. It is only because they don’t readily lend themselves to the comprehension of our material nature, that we try to scoff them into the limbo of absurdity and imposture.”
“Ah,” said Mrs Jefferson. “Talking of clairvoyance, that I do believe in. I knew a coloured woman in America—the way that woman would tell you things—it was enough to make your flesh creep! She’d just go quietly off to sleep, and you might ask her anything you liked, and she’d tell you; and it was all as true as possible.”
The princess met Julian Estcourt’s eyes, and smiled strangely. Mrs Jefferson caught the glance.
“Perhaps,” she said, “you’re a clairvoyant?”
“I used to be,” she said, gravely. “Perhaps my faculties have grown blunted, for want of use. They are far from being as keen as they were in India. However,” and she smiled at the circle of faces, “I wonder if any of you would believe me if I told you what you were talking about at dinner time. First of all, you must remember, your conversation could not have been betrayed to me by my friend, as he was not there, and that my rooms are on the opposite wing to the dining saloon. Well, you discussed different phases of spiritualism. This lady,” she indicated Mrs Masterman, “gave her experiences of imposture; you,” looking at Mrs Jefferson, “combated those experiences by your own, and this gentleman.”—she smiled at the cynical individual, who was hovering on the outskirts of the circle—“silenced you all by reducing your theories to strong commonsense facts. Shall I quote his own words? After the rate people have been running after spiritual phenomena, they are absolutely refreshing. He said that it was an intensely humiliating idea to find oneself at the beck and call of any other human being when you imagined you had done with this life.”
“Good gracious!” almost screamed Mrs Jefferson, “but how on earth did you hear all this? It’s positively alarming.”
“Well,” said the princess, still smiling at the pale and conscience-stricken faces, “you see I have a—faculty shall I call it?—that enables me to hear and see anything I am curious about, or interested in. I don’t believe I could even explain how I do it; but it seems easy and natural enough to myself. I only paid you a brief visit to-night, more that I might have a little bit of proof to give you, that the powers I spoke of do exist, and are capable of being trained to almost any extent, if the motives for developing them are good. Have I convinced you?”
She rose as she spoke, and stood facing them in her beautiful indolent grace. She was garbed in some white soft stuff, which floated round her like a cloud, the wide hanging sleeves were lined with faint shell-like pink, and fell away from her bare lovely arms to the hem of her floating draperies. She looked like some goddess of mythology, rather than a living woman, and as Julian Estcourt gazed at her he felt a sudden thrill of awe.