Mme. Dauvray was indignant. Celia, for her part, felt humiliated and small. They sat down to their dinner in the garden, but the rain began to fall and drove them indoors. There were a few people dining at the same hour, but none near enough to overhear them. Alike in the garden and the dining-room, Adèle Tacé kept up the same note of ridicule and disbelief. She had been carefully tutored for her work. She was able to cite the stock cases of exposure—“les frères Davenport,” as she called them, Eusapia Palladino and Dr. Slade. She knew the precautions which had been taken to prevent trickery and where those precautions had failed. Her whole conversation was carefully planned to one end, and to one end alone. She wished to produce in the minds of her companions so complete an impression of her scepticism that it would seem the most natural thing in the world to both of them that she should insist upon subjecting Celia to the severest tests. The rain ceased, and they took their coffee on the terrace of the hotel. Mme. Dauvray had been really pained by the conversation of Adèle Tacé. She had all the missionary zeal of a fanatic.
“I do hope, Adèle, that we shall make you believe. But we shall. Oh, I am confident we shall.” And her voice was feverish.
Adèle dropped for the moment her tone of raillery.
“I am not unwilling to believe,” she said, “but I cannot. I am interested—yes. You see how much I have studied the subject. But I cannot believe. I have heard stories of how these manifestations are produced—stories which make me laugh. I cannot help it. The tricks are so easy. A young girl wearing a black frock which does not rustle—it is always a black frock, is it not, because a black frock cannot be seen in the dark?—carrying a scarf or veil, with which she can make any sort of headdress if only she is a little clever, and shod in a pair of felt-soled slippers, is shut up in a cabinet or placed behind a screen, and the lights are turned down or out—” Adèle broke off with a comic shrug of the shoulders. “Bah! It ought not to deceive a child.”
Celia sat with a face which would grow red. She did not look, but none the less she was aware that Mme. Dauvray was gazing at her with a perplexed frown and some return of her suspicion showing in her eyes. Adèle Tacé was not content to leave the subject there.
“Perhaps,” she said, with a smile, “Mlle. Célie dresses in that way for a séance?”
“Madame shall see tonight,” Celia stammered, and Camille Dauvray rather sternly repeated her words.
“Yes, Adèle shall see tonight. I myself will decide what you shall wear, Célie.”
Adèle Tacé casually suggested the kind of dress which she would prefer.
“Something light in colour with a train, something which will hiss and whisper if mademoiselle moves about the room—yes, and I think one of mademoiselle’s big hats,” she said. “We will have mademoiselle as modern as possible, so that, when the great ladies of the past appear in the coiffure of their day, we may be sure it is not Mlle. Célie who represents them.”
“I will speak to Hélène,” said Mme. Dauvray, and Adèle Tacé was content.
There was a particular new dress of which she knew, and it was very desirable that Mlle. Célie should wear it tonight. For one thing, if Celia wore it, it would help the theory that she had put it on because she expected that night a lover; for another, with that dress there went a pair of satin slippers which had just come home from a shoemaker at Aix, and which would leave upon soft mould precisely the same imprints as the grey suede shoes which the girl was wearing now.
Celia was not greatly disconcerted by Mme. Rossignol’s precautions. She would have to be a little more careful, and Mme. de Montespan would be a little longer in responding to the call of Mme. Dauvray than most of the other dead ladies of the past had been. But that was all. She was, however, really troubled in another way. All through dinner, at every word of the conversation, she had felt her reluctance towards this séance swelling into a positive disgust. More than once she had felt driven by some uncontrollable power to rise up at the table and cry out to Adèle:
“You are right! It is trickery. There is no truth in it.”
But she had mastered herself. For opposite to her sat her patroness, her good friend, the woman who had saved her. The flush upon Mme. Dauvray’s cheeks and the agitation of her manner warned Celia how much hung upon the success of this last séance. How much for both of them!
And in the fullness of that knowledge a great fear assailed her. She began to be afraid, so strong was her reluctance, that she would not bring her heart into the task. “Suppose I failed tonight because I could not force myself to wish not to fail!” she thought, and she steeled herself against the thought. Tonight she must not fail. For apart altogether from Mme. Dauvray’s happiness, her own, it seemed, was at stake too.
“It must be from my lips that Harry learns what I have been,” she said to herself, and with the resolve she strengthened herself.
“I will wear what you please,” she said, with a smile. “I only wish Mme. Rossignol to be satisfied.”
“And I shall be,” said Adèle, “if—” She leaned forward in anxiety. She had come to the real necessity of Hélène Vauquier’s plan. “If we abandon as quite laughable the cupboard door and the string across it; if, in a word, mademoiselle consents that we tie her hand and foot and fasten her securely in a chair.
