You forced me to it. I should have had strength to refuse you. I yielded. Now my cowardice will ruin you.”
“Was not your trance genuine?” she queried. “Entirely genuine, entirely too genuine.”
“Did not the writing appear upon the slate independent of your will or of mine?” she demanded.
“It did,” he admitted. “Can you explain how it came there?” she wound up. “Alas, no,” he confessed, shaking his head.
“You can scarcely reproach me for accepting it as a message,” she concluded triumphantly.
“I do not reproach you,” he said, “I reproach myself as culpable.”
“I rather thank you for what you have done for me,” she almost smiled at him. “It gives me hope. I have meditated carefully upon the message and I am convinced that I comprehend its meaning.”
“That is the worst possible state of mind you could get into,” he groaned. “Can I not make you realize the truth? It is not as you think you see it.”
“I do not think,” she said. “I know. I am convinced, and I mean to act on my convictions.”
“This is terrible,” he muttered. Then he controlled himself, shifted his position in his chair and asked: “And what are your convictions? What do you mean to do?”
“My conviction,” she said, “is that David's love for Marian is in some way bound up with whatever he had buried in that coffin. I mean to have the coffin disinterred.”
“Madame,” he said, “this thing gets worse the more you tell me of it. You are in danger of coming under the domination of a fixed idea, even if you are not already under its sway. Fight against it. Shake it off.”
“There is no use in your talking that way to me,” she said. “I mean to do it. I shall do it.”
“Has your husband consented?” Vargas asked.
“He has,” she replied.
“Do you mean to tell me that he has agreed to your opening his wife's grave?”
“He has agreed,” she asserted.
“But did he make no demur?” the clairvoyant inquired.
“He said he did not care what I did, I could do anything I pleased.”
“Was that all he said?” Vargas persisted.
“Not all,” she admitted. “He asked me if I had not told him that what I wanted in this life was to spend as much as possible of my time on earth with him, for us two to be together as much as circumstances would allow, and as long as death would permit. I told him of course I had said it, not once but over and over. He asked me if I still felt that way. I told him I did. He said it made no difference to him he was past any feelings, but if that was what I really wanted he advised me to let that grave alone.”
“Take his advice, by all means,” Vargas exclaimed. “It is good advice. You let that grave alone.”
“I am determined,” she told him. “Madame,” he said, “will you listen to me?”
“Certainly,” she replied. “If you have anything to say to the purpose. But not to fault-findings or to scoldings.”
“Mrs. Llewellyn,” Vargas began, “what happened during your former visit to me has demolished the entire structure of my spiritual existence. I had the sincerest disbelief in astrology, in prophecy, in ghosts, in apparitions, in superstitions, each and all, in supernaturalism in general, in religions, individually and collectively, in the idea of future life. Upon the most materialistic convictions my intellectual life was placid and unruffled, and my soul-life, if I had any, undisturbed by anything save occasional and very evanescent twinges of conscience over the contemptible duplicity of my way of livelihood. Intermittently only I despised myself. Mostly I only despised my dupes and generally not even that. Rather I merely smiled tolerantly at the childishness of their profitable credulity. Never did I have the remotest approach to any shadow of belief that there could be anything occult beneath or behind any such jugglery as I continually made use of. The matter of your horoscope and mine I took as mere coincidence. It might affect my feelings, never my reason; my heart, never my head. My head is involved now, my reason at fault. In the writing on that slate I am face to face with something, if not supernatural, at least preternatural. The thing is beyond our ordinary experience of the ordinary operation of those forces which make the world go. It depends upon something not yet understood, not necessarily inexplicable, but unexplained. It is uncanny. I don't like it. Yet I do not yield to its influence. I am not swept away. If I dwell upon it, I know it will unsettle my reason. I do not mean to dwell upon it, I mean to get away from it, to ignore it, to forget it, and I counsel you to do likewise.”
“Your counsel,” she said, “has a long-winded preamble, but is entirely unacceptable.”
“I have more to say,” he went on. “Mere bewilderment of mind is not an adequate ground for action. There is a fine old proverb that says, 'When in doubt, do nothing.' Take its advice and your husband's; do nothing.”
“But I am not in doubt,” she protested. “I am convinced that I was meant to come to you, that the message was meant for me, and that I know what it means. I am determined to act upon it.”
He shook his head with a gesture of despair, but continued:
“I have more yet to say and on another point. I advise you to go away from all this. You should and you can. You have your own wealth and your husband's opulence at your disposal. You have one of the finest steam-yachts on the seas awaiting your pleasure. Much as you have traveled, the globe has many fascinating regions still new to you. Your husband and you have practically not traveled at all since your marriage. You should still hope for your husband's recovery of his spirits by natural means. Travel is the most obvious prescription. Try that. Because your husband had not emerged from his brooding upon his loss and grief during two years of wandering alone with a valet; because he has not recovered his spirits after two years of matrimony spent in the neighborhood of his first wife's grave, in mansions full of memories of her, is no reason for not hoping that his elasticity will revive during months or years spent with you among delightful scenes of novelty, far from anything to recall his mind to old associations.”
“I have no hope in any such attempt,” she said wearily. “When I cannot bear my life here with a mate who is no more than a likeness of the man I loved, why drag this soulless semblance about the oceans of the earth in the hope of seeing it awake to love me? Shall I expect a miracle from salt air or the rays of the Southern cross?”
“Mrs. Llewellyn,” Vargas said, “I have taken the liberty of making inquiries, quite unobtrusively, concerning your husband's treatment of you. I find that it is the general impression that he is a very uxorious, a very loverly husband. Except the barest minimum required for his affairs, he spends his entire time with you. His best friends, his boyhood's chums, his life-long cronies he never converses with, never chats with, hardly talks to, and for all his genial cordiality and courtesy, barely more than greets in passing. He is seldom seen at his clubs and very briefly. To all appearances he devotes himself to you wholly. You have all the external trappings of happiness: health, beauty, a devoted husband, the most desirable intimates, countless friends, luxurious surroundings, and unlimited affluence. It is for you to put life into all this, it is your duty to recall to it what you miss. You should leave no natural means untried turning to what you propose.”
“My determination is irrevocably taken,” she said. “But what do you expect to find in the coffin?” he queried.
“I have no expectations, not even any anticipations,” she said. “We may find keepsakes of some kind; there cannot be love-letters, for they scarcely separated a day after they met, or an hour after they married. There may be nothing in the coffin. But I am convinced that whatever it does or does not contain, David's love for Marian is bound up with the closure of that coffin. I believe that if it is opened he will be released from his passion of grief and be free to love me.
“You mean practically to resort to an incantation, a sort of witchcraft. The notion is altogether unworthy of you, especially while so natural a device as travel remains untried.”
“You do not understand,” she said, “that I feel compelled to do something.”
“Is not going for a cruise doing something?” he asked.
“Practically doing nothing,” she replied. “Just being with David and watching for the change that never comes. You don't know how that makes me feel forced to take some action.”
“I do not know,” he said, “because you have not told me.”
“I cannot tell you,” she said, “because I cannot find any words to express what I feel. I could not convey it to you, the loneliness that overwhelms me when I am alone with David. It is worse than being alone; I cannot imagine feeling so lonely lost in a wilderness, solitary in the desert, adrift on a raft in mid-ocean. Being with David, as he is, makes me feel — ” (her voice sank to a whisper and her face grew pale, her lips gray) “oh, it makes me feel as if I were worse than with nobody. It makes me feel as if I were with nothing, with nothing at all.”
“I sympathize with you deeply,” said Vargas. “But all you say only deepens my conviction that your one road to safety lies in striving to overcome these feelings; your best hope is change of scene and travel. Above all let that
