Title: The Mystery of a Turkish Bath
Author: Rita
Language: English
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The Mystery of a Turkish Bath, by Rita.

________________________________________________________________________
Under the pseudonym "Rita" E M Gollan wrote some seventy novels of
which this is one.  It is a rather penetrating book about the
supernatural.  It starts off with a somewhat unusual situation, at least
in literature, with a group of ladies in the turkish bath of a large and
luxurious hotel by the sea, in England, the sort of hotel to which
people go to be cured of illnesses, on the recommendation of their
doctors.  It is some time in the late nineteenth century.

An extraordinarily beautiful woman appears one day in the turkish bath,
and the women already in there are quite fascinated by her.  But there
is another guest in the hotel, a Colonel Estcourt, who, it turns out had
known this woman since childhood.  Indeed it had been expected that they
would one day wed, but instead she had gone off and married an elderly,
but fabulously wealthy, Russian prince.

Various demonstrations of her occult powers make the guests, both men
and women, realise that the beautiful Princess is someone with very
special gifts, which one or two of them would like to learn more about.
But in the very process of the ensuing teach-in, more things happen
than had been bargained for, and both the Colonel and the Princess end
up lifeless.  The Mystery deepens.

If you like this sort of thing it is a very good novel, but if you are
not happy to read about the occult, you should leave it severely alone.

________________________________________________________________________
THE MYSTERY OF A TURKISH BATH, BY RITA.



CHAPTER ONE.

THE FIRST ROOM.

"I take them for rheumatic gout," said a slight, dark-haired woman to
her neighbour, as she leant back in a low lounging-chair, and sipped
some water an attendant had just brought her.  "You would not suppose I
suffered from such a complaint, would you?"--and she held up a small
arched foot, with a scarcely perceptible swelling in the larger joint.
She laughed somewhat affectedly, and the neighbour, who was fat and
coarse, and had decided gouty symptoms herself, looked at her with
something of the contempt an invalid elephant might be supposed to
bestow on a buzzing fly.

"You made that remark the last time you were here," she said; "and I
told you, if you suffered from a suppressed form of the disease, it
would be all the worse for you.  Much better for it to come out--my
doctor says."

There was no doubt about the disease having "come out" in the person of
the speaker.  It had "come out" in her face, which was brilliantly
rubicund; in her hands, and ankles and feet, which were a distressful
spectacle of "knobs" and "bumps" of an exaggerated phrenological type--
perhaps also in her temper, which was fierce and fiery as her
complexion, as most of the frequenters of the Baths knew, and the
attendants also, to their cost.

The small, dark lady, with the arched feet, lapsed into sulky silence,
and let her eyes wander over the room to see if anyone she knew was
there.

The Baths were of an extensive and sumptuous description--fitted up with
almost oriental luxury and comfort, and attached to a monster hotel,
built by an enterprising Company of speculators, at an English winter
resort, in Hampshire.

The Company had proudly hoped that lavish expenditure, a beautiful
situation, and the disinterested recommendation of fashionable
physicians, would induce English people to discover that there were
spots and places in their own land as healthy and convenient as
Auvergne, or Wiesbaden, or the Riviera.  But though the coast views were
fine, and the scenery picturesque, and the monster hotel itself stood on
a commanding eminence, surrounded by darkly-beautiful pine woods, and
was fitted up with every luxury of modern civilisation, including every
specimen of Bath that human ingenuity had devised, the Company looked
blankly at the returns on their balance-sheet, and one or two Directors
murmured audible complaints at special Board meetings, against the
fashionable physicians who had not acted up to their promises, or proved
deserving of the substantial bonus which had been more than hinted at,
as a reward for recommended patients.

On this December morning, some half-dozen ladies, of various ages and
stability of person, and all suffering, in a greater or less degree,
from various fashionable complaints--such as neuralgia, indigestion,
rheumatism, or its aristocratic cousin, rheumatic-gout--were in Room
Number One of the Turkish Bath.

The female form is generally supposed to be "divine," and poets and
painters have, from time immemorial, rhapsodised over "beauty
unadorned."  It is probable that such poets and painters have never been
gratified by such a vision of feminine charms as Room Number One
presented.

Light and airy garments were, certainly, to be seen, but not--forms.  It
was, of course, a question of taste, as to whether the fat women, or the
thin women, looked the worst--probably the former, if one might judge by
the two samples of the lady who had arched feet, and the lady who had
_not_.

Both were staying at the hotel, and were respectively named--Mrs
Masterman, and Mrs Ray Jefferson.  Mrs Masterman was a widow.  Mrs
Ray Jefferson had a husband.  He was an American, blessed with many
dollars, amassed on the strength of an "Invention."  When Mr Jefferson
spoke of the Invention, people usually supposed it to be of a mechanical
nature.  As they became more familiar with him, they learnt that it was
something "Chemical."  No one quite knew what, but it became associated
in their minds with "vats" and "boilers," and large works somewhere
"down Boston way."  There could be no doubt of the excellence of the
Invention, because Mr Ray Jefferson said it was known, and used all
over Europe, and its success was backed by dollars to an apparently
unlimited extent.  The Inventor and his wife had sumptuous rooms, but
they were not averse to mixing with their "fellow-man," or rather
"woman,"--for Mrs Jefferson rejoiced in the possession of certain
Parisian _toilettes_, and was not selfish enough to keep them only for
the eyes of her lord and master.

She was grudgingly but universally acknowledged to be the best-dressed
woman in the hotel--except, of course, when she was in the Turkish
Baths, which unfortunately reduced its frequenters to one level of
apparelling, a garment which made up in simplicity for any lack of
elegance.

The shape was always the same--viz., short in the skirt, low in the
neck, and bare as to sleeves.  The material was generally pink cotton,
or white with a red border.

Mrs Jefferson was quite American enough to have "notions" on dress,
more or less original and extravagant.  Finding her companion was
unusually silent this morning, she gave up her thoughts to the devising
of a special toilet for the Bath.

These garments were so hideous, she told herself, that it was no wonder
people looked such guys in them.  Still there was no reason why she
should not have something _chic_ and novel for herself--something which
should arouse the envy of, and make the wearer appear quite different
to, the other women.

The choice of style was easy enough--something Grecian and artistic--but
the material discomposed her.  It was hardly possible to have a bath of
this description without one's garment getting into a moist and clinging
condition--leaving alone the after processes of shampooing, _douche_,
and plunge.  So silk, or satin, or woollen material was out of the
question, and cotton was common, not to say vulgar.

She knitted her brows with a vigour demanded by so absorbing a subject:
the white head-cloth fell off, and she felt that her fringe was all out
of curl and lay straight on her forehead in most unbecoming fashion.
That also would have to be considered in the question of costume--a
head-dress which should combine use and ornament.  The idea of having
only a wet, white rag on one's head!  No wonder people looked "objects!"
Perhaps it would be better to coil the hair about the brow and have no
fringe, or at least only a few loose locks that would look equally well,
straight or curled.

As Mrs Ray Jefferson was taking all this trouble about her personal
appearance, when that appearance would only gratify the sight of a few
members of her own sex who were generally too much taken up with their
own ailments or complaints to care what their fellow-sufferers looked
like, it shows the fallacy of a popular superstition that women only
care to dress for men.  Believe me, no--they dress for critics, the
critics of their own sex, who with one contemptuous glance can sweep a
_toilette_ into insignificance, and make its wearer miserable, or, by
some envious approbation, are reluctantly compelled to bestow on it the
seal of success.

Is it for men, think you, that those delicate _nuances_ and tints and
shades are harmonised and put together?  Such a conceit is only
pardonable in a set of beings who possess not the delicate faculty of
"detail," and who, with a limited knowledge of even cardinal colours,
describe the graces and beauties of a _toilette_ by saying the wearer
had on something white, or something black, or something red, but "it
suited her down to the ground."  A few misguided individuals have even
been known to take refuge in the remark (made historic now by comic
papers) that "they never look _under_ the table," when asked what
certain ladies had on.  But this is trifling, and only applicable to
dinner parties.

Mrs Ray Jefferson's thoughts had not prevented her from taking stock of
the other inmates of the room.  One or two were lying on couches, but
most of them seemed to prefer the low comfortable chairs, that were like
rocking-chairs without the rockers.

No one spoke.  They looked solemn and suffering, and appeared intent
merely on the symptoms of distilled moisture on the visible portion of
their persons.

"I think," said Mrs Jefferson, "I shall go into the second room.  I can
stand some more heat."

She made the remark, abstractedly, in the direction of her neighbour,
who only looked at her in a bored and ill-tempered fashion, as befitted
one who had gout without arched feet to display as compensation.

"You and I are the only hotel people here," went on Mrs Jefferson, as
she took up the glass of water and the head-cloth preparatory to moving
away.  Then she laughed again as she looked at her companion's flushed
countenance and generally distressed appearance.  "What a comfort," she
said, "that we won't look quite such objects at dinner-time!  I always
find a bath improves my complexion, don't you?"

Mrs Markham gave an impatient grunt.  "As if it mattered what one looks
like in a bath!" she said.  "Do you Americans live in public all your
lives?  You seem to be always thinking of your clothes, or your looks!"

Mrs Jefferson opened her lips to reply with suitable indignation, but
the words were cut short by a gasp of astonishment, and lost themselves
in one wondering, long-drawn monosyllable--"My--!"

The gouty sufferer also looked up, and in the direction of the doorway,
and though she said nothing, her eyes expressed as much surprise as was
compatible with a sluggish temperament, and a disposition to cavil at
most things and persons that were presented to her notice.

The object on which the two pairs of feminine eyes rested was only the
figure of a woman standing between the thick oriental curtains that
partitioned off the dressing from the shampooing and douche rooms.

A woman--but a woman so beautiful that she held even her own sex dumb
with admiration.  She was tall, but not too tall for perfect grace; and
slender, but with the slenderness of some young pictured goddess.  She
was dark, too, but with a pale clear skin that was more lovely than any
dead blonde whiteness; and to crown her charms, she had long rippling
hair of jet black hue that was parted from her brow and fell like a veil
to her delicate arched feet, and through which the serious, darkly--
glowing eyes looked straight at the wondering faces before her.

The pause she made before entering was brief, but not so brief that
every eye there had not scanned enviously and wonderingly her perfect
beauty--from the clear-cut, exquisite face and bare, beautifully--shaped
arms, to the graceful ankles, gleaming white as sculptured marble
through the veiling hair.

Mrs Jefferson first recovered speech.

"Who is she?" she whispered eagerly.  "Not at our hotel I think.  Looks
like a walking advertisement of a new hair restorer.  She'd be a fortune
to them if she'd have her photograph taken so!"

The newcomer meanwhile advanced and took one of the chairs near Mrs
Jefferson.  That lady suffered strongly from the curiosity that is
characteristic of her admirable nation.  She re-seated herself for the
purpose of studying the strange vision, and, not being in the least
degree afflicted with English reticence, she set the ball of
conversation going by an immediate remark:

"Had any of these baths before?"

The person addressed looked at her with grave and serious eyes.

"No," she said; and her voice was singularly clear and sweet, but with
something foreign in the slow accentuation of words.  "I only arrived at
this hotel last night."

"Oh!" said Mrs Jefferson, "is that so?  I thought I hadn't seen you
before.  Come for your health?"

"Yes," said the stranger, accepting a glass of water from the attendant,
who had just come forward.

"Not gout, I suppose?" suggested Mrs Jefferson, conscious that there
were arched feet in the world even more exquisite in shape and size than
her own.

"Gout!  Oh, no!" said the stranger, smiling faintly.  "They say my
nerves are not strong.  I sleep badly, I am easily startled, and easily
fatigued."  She paused a moment, and one delicate hand, glittering with
rings, pushed back the dark weight of rippling hair from her brow.  "I
have had a great mental shock," she said, quietly.  "Such things require
time... one cannot easily forget..."

Her eyes had grown dreamy and abstracted.  The hand that had pushed back
her heavy hair fell on her lap.  She looked at it and its shining rings,
and Mrs Jefferson's sharp glance followed hers.  Was there a plain gold
circlet among that glittering array?--was the beautiful stranger wife or
maiden?

"If any man saw her now!" she thought involuntarily.  "My!  I wouldn't
give much for his peace of mind afterwards!  What owls she makes us all
look!"

"Nerves are queer things," she said aloud.  "Can't say I'm much troubled
with them, except here," and she moved her foot explanatorily.  "Just
that joint.  It's agony sometimes.  Suppressed gout, you know.  You
wouldn't think so to look at it, would you?"

"That the gout was--suppressed? certainly I should," answered the
stranger, smiling.  "There is no external sign of it.  I always thought
gout meant large lumps, and swellings of the joints."

"So it does," said Mrs Jefferson, with an involuntary glance at the
moist and crimson sufferer on her right.  "But my form of it is
different.  It is much worse, but no one sympathises with me because it
doesn't _look_ so bad as the other gout."

"It is not often that people do sympathise with illness," said the
beautiful woman.  "When we ourselves are well, we think suffering can't
be so very great after all, and when we are ill we are quite sure no one
else has to bear so much pain.  Human nature is essentially selfish.  It
is a natural incident of living at all that we should estimate our own
life as more important than our neighbours."

"Well," laughed Mrs Jefferson, "if we sacrificed it to them, it might
be a doubtful benefit.  I often thank my stars I wasn't born in the age
of martyrs.  If J. had been, I'm sure the very sight of the rack or the
faggot would have made me swear anything."

"The history of religions is a very curious history," said the stranger
in her low clear tones.  "Looked at dispassionately, it has done very
little for mankind in general, save to prove one fundamental truth that
is more significant than any doctrine or dogma.  That truth is the
inherent need in all humanity of something to worship.  From the highest
to the lowest degrees of civilisation that need has made itself the
exponent of external forms.  It is the kernel of all religions."

"A kernel that is surrounded with a very hard shell," said Mrs
Jefferson glibly.  She liked discussions, and was accustomed to say she
could talk on any subject--having indeed come from a country where women
did talk on any subject, whether they were acquainted, with it or not.
"I don't think there is much spirituality in any modern religion," she
went on.  "I surmise it's dead.  Science has got the upper hand of
theology and means to keep it.  People are not content now-a-days with
being told `you must believe so and so.'  They want a reason for
believing.  You're not a Romanist, are you?" she added suddenly.

"I--oh no," said the stranger with a faint smile.

"I'm glad of that, for I was just going to say that the Church of Rome
has done more to retard rational and spiritual progress than any other.
I don't believe in the voice of man barring the way to inquiry.  God
made man, and, as far as I have ever been able to learn, He made them
all on one pattern.  The offices and dignities they give themselves
won't make them one whit greater or more important in His eyes."

"You are a democrat, I see," said the beautiful woman, looking gravely
and scrutinisingly at the eager flushed face, with its ruffled damp
curls, and quick restless eyes.

"Well," said Mrs Jefferson, "I don't exactly know what I am.  My views
are liberal on most subjects.  I've travelled a good bit, and I think
that enlarges the mind.  I've just run over to have a look at England.
Our people are laughing at her pretty well.  The Gladstone party have
made a lovely hash of affairs haven't they?  But perhaps you don't care
for politics, being foreign."

"Oh, yes, I do," answered her strange companion.  "And I am specially
interested in English politics," she added.  "Like yourself I was
curious to see a nation who seemed determined to court their own shame,
and to deify the being whose career is signally marked by obloquy and
disaster."

"His day is pretty well over, I fancy," said Mrs Jefferson, eagerly
scenting an opportunity for a brilliant display of political knowledge.
"That Irish business has settled him.  They call him the greatest
statesman of the age!  A man at dinner last night was lauding him up to
the skies.  There was quite a battle about him.  We showed, however,
that, putting his talking powers aside, he really is no statesman--only
a grasping selfish old bungler, who cares nothing for his country except
it keeps him in office, and has done nothing really great or good during
his whole career.  They make a fuss about the Education Act, but the
credit of passing that belongs to Foster.  As for the Disestablishment
of the Irish Church, that is a disgraceful business--a robbery of the
dead who had left their money to support a faith they believed in.  He
is responsible--to my thinking--for all the anarchy, confusion and
misery in that poor unhappy Ireland.  I believe," and she leant forward
and dropped her voice, "I believe that at heart the man is more than
half a Romanist.  See how he has favoured the High Church party, and if
ever he gives a clerical appointment it is always to a Ritualist priest.
They don't call themselves _clergymen_ now.  Well," and she drew
herself up once more, "I, for one, wouldn't like to have his sins on my
shoulders.  I should think he ought to be haunted by as many victims as
Napoleon Buonaparte.  What with financial humbug, war taxes--the
blunders of the Alabama business--the disgrace and bloodshed of the
Transvaal affair and the Egyptian war--crowned by the undying and never
to be forgotten shame of Gordon's sacrificed life, I wonder he can lay
down his head at night and sleep.  When he heard of that hero Gordon's
death he should have taken a pistol and blown out his blundering brains.
But perhaps," she added more calmly, "he was afraid of meeting his
victims until he couldn't help himself.  However, he might have gone
into one of those `retreats' his favourite Ritualists are so fond of,
and spared England any more blunders and follies."

"You are very bitter against him," said the stranger calmly.  "Be sure
that his own actions will also be his own avengers.  Life would be made
much more tolerable if we would only keep that fact before us.  To my
mind there is no backbone or support in a religion that teaches
irresponsibility.  That is the great fault of you Christians.  Your
faith is not a thing you take hold of, and grasp and act upon.  Hence
your many national disasters.  You shelve your future, or what you call
your salvation, on the merits of a Sacrifice, and think yourselves
relieved of all further trouble.  In the world, and in society, religion
is a tabooed subject--it is only kept for Sundays and for churches.  I
believe your clergy know no more of the _real_ doctrines of
Christianity, those deep and _mystical_ truths underlying the teachings
of Christ, than the child at his mother's knee.  I have been to your
great cathedrals and churches.  I saw only lip-service and routine.  I
heard only stale maxims, weak explanations of the allegories and
parables that fill your Biblical records; flowing rhetoric and vague
expressions of some undefinable joy and glory in an equally undefinable
Hereafter, that was sometimes described as a place, and sometimes as a
state.  That was all.  I feel such things cannot long stand against the
tide of advancing thought.  Modern Christianity is not the Sermon on the
Mount, and has little title to the name of its founder.  It has not a
feather's weight of importance in the minds of the worldly, the
fashionable, the pleasure-seeking; its sentiment is extinct, save in a
few faithful ignorant hearts, who adore what they cannot comprehend, and
live in a state of hope that all will come right in some vague future."

The beautiful eyes had grown sad and thoughtful.  They rested on the
eager wondering face before her, yet seemed to look through and beyond
it, as the eyes of one who sees a vision that is mere airy nothingness
to the surrounding crowd.

"It will come right," she went on slowly and dreamily, "but not as men
think, and not because the religion of earth teaches fear of punishment
and hope of reward as the basis of spiritual faith.  No.  Something
higher and holier and deeper than any motive of self-safety will perfect
what is best in man and eliminate what is vile."

"If that is so," interposed Mrs Jefferson, glibly, as she rose from her
chair to proceed to the Second Room--"I guess man will want a pretty
long time to `perfect' in.  I don't see how he's going to do it here."

"I did not say `here,'" answered the stranger, in her slow, calm way, as
she, too, rose and prepared to follow the little American.  "For what,
think you, are the ages of Eternity intended?--sleep and dreams?"

Mrs Jefferson gave a little shudder.  "I surmise we're getting a little
too deep," she said.  "Let's keep to Gladstone and the Irish Question
while the thermometer's at 110."



CHAPTER TWO.

THE SECOND ROOM.

The second room differed in no way from the first, except in the matter
of heat.

The beautiful stranger floated in--her face all the lovelier for the
faint rosy flush that glowed through the clear skin.  If Mrs Ray
Jefferson's admiration was envious, at least it was genuine.  She had
never really believed in perfect feminine beauty before--beauty that
shone supreme without the aid of dress and frippery--but here it was--a
glowing and palpable fact.  The simple white drapery with its border of
scarlet floated with the grace of its own perfect simplicity around that
perfect form, and never was royal mantle more splendid than the rippling
hair that crowned her head and fell in its luxuriance of curls and waves
to her feet.  As they again seated themselves side by side, Mrs
Jefferson remembered that she was not yet acquainted with the
nationality of the stranger.  She hastened to repair the error of such
ignorance.

"You speak English wonderfully for a foreigner," she said; "it would
puzzle anyone to make out where you were raised--Russian, I surmise?"

"No," said the stranger, quietly, "though I have lived there a great
deal.  It was my husband's country."

Mrs Jefferson looked radiant.  She was married, then.  That was
something to have learnt.  "_Was_,"--she said quickly, "Is he not living
then?"

"No."  The beautiful face grew a shade paler.  "I would rather not talk
about it," she said.  "His death was very tragic and terrible."

"I'm sorry," said the little American, with ready contrition; "don't
think I'm curious," she added, suddenly, "but one doesn't see a woman
like you every day.  I surmise you'll make a sensation in the hotel."

"I have my own private rooms here," was the quiet response.  "I shall
not mix with the other visitors."

"Oh," cried Mrs Jefferson, her face clouding, "I call that cruel.
There are really some very good people here--titles, if you like them--
money, if you care for that--one or two geniuses--a musician and a poet
who are working for a future generation, because they can't get
appreciated here--and the usual crowd of mediocrities.  Oh, you really
must come to our evenings; they'd amuse you immensely.  We're quite
dependent on ourselves for society.  This is the dullest of dull holes,
still we manage to get a bit spry not and then.  Now, you--why, if you'd
only show yourself to be looked at, you'd be doing the whole hotel a
good turn."

The stranger shook her head.  "Society never amuses me," she said.  "It
has nothing to offer that can rival the charms of books, art, and
solitude.  I possess all three."

Mrs Jefferson opened her eyes wide.  "The first and the last," she
said, "are comprehensible as travelling companions, but what about the
middle one?"

"In my train I have a blind musician, whose equal I have never met, and
a boy sculptor whose genius will one day astonish the world.  For
myself, I paint and I write, and I have a store of books that will
outlast the longest limit of companionship.  Can you tell me what better
things the world will give?"

Mrs Ray Jefferson murmured something vaguely about amusement and
distraction.  She was growing more and more perplexed about this
beautiful Mystery.  Anyone who travelled about with a train of
attendants must surely be a princess at the very least.

"Amusement!"--the stranger smiled.  "Does society ever _really_ give us
that?  We have to smile when we are bored--to tell polite falsehoods
every hour--to eat and drink when we would rather fast--to awake all
sorts of evil passions in other people's minds if we are better-looking
or better dressed, or more admired; and have them aroused in our own if
we are _not_?  Does a ball amuse?  Does a dinner-party?  Does even a
comedy, after the first quarter of an hour?  I can answer for myself in
the negative, at all events."

"Gracious!" exclaimed Mrs Jefferson wonderingly.  "You must be a
strange person, and you look so young.  Why, I should have thought you
were just the age for society?  Don't you care to be admired?"

"Not in the least.  I have learnt the value of men's passions.  A quiet
life is more wholesome and infinitely more contenting than anything
society can offer."

"For a time, perhaps; but it would become dull and monotonous, I should
think."

"Never, if you have the mind to appreciate it.  The companionship I
value will always come to me.  I do not need to seek it in the world."

"You are fortunate," said Mrs Jefferson, somewhat sarcastically.
"Ordinary mortals have to take what they can get.  Still, I suppose such
things are only a matter of personal disposition.  If one has the mood
for enjoyment, one can find it anywhere; if not--well, a funeral or a
comedy would be equally amusing."

"I suppose," said the stranger, quietly, "you have the mood."

"Well, I'm blessed with a pretty fair capacity for enjoying all that
comes in my way," said the little American, frankly.  "I like studying
human nature, even though I'm not clever enough to describe it.  It's
like the critics, you know, who find it so powerful easy to cut up a
book, yet couldn't write one themselves to save their lives.  Phew-ew!
how hot it is here!  How do you contrive to look so cool?"

"I can stand a great deal of heat," answered the other, tranquilly.  "I
have Eastern blood in my veins, on my mother's side.  Is that the
hottest room?" she added, nodding in the direction of the third doorway.

"Yes.  I suppose you won't go there?  I never dare put my nose inside.
It's enough to scorch the skin off you."

"I don't suppose it can be hotter than the rooms in the East," answered
the stranger, as she rose and moved towards it.  She stood for a moment
looking in, then turned back and smiled at her late companion.  "Oh, I
can bear it," she said, and disappeared from sight.

The little American pouted and looked disturbed.  "What a shame!  I had
ever so many more things to ask her," she said, "and to think, after
all, I don't know her name, or even to what country she belongs, and I
did so want the whole story pat for the _table d'hote_ dinner
to-night...  Ready to be shampooed?--oh, yes, Morrison; I'm just about
`done through;' I'm glad you can take me first."

She rose abruptly and followed the attendant past the flushed and
perspiring groups who were still comparing notes as to different
ailments and degrees of moisture, occasionally holding out their arms
for mutual inspection.

"I wonder," she said to herself, "how that one woman manages to look so
different.  Why, we get uglier and uglier, and she only more and more
beautiful.  Perhaps she's a Rosicrucian!"

------------------------------------------------------------------------



CHAPTER THREE.

THE COOLING ROOM.

A long room, down the centre of which ran a row of couches; on either
side were the dressing-rooms, curtained off from the main apartment by
curtains of dark Oriental blue, bordered with dull red.  In the large
bay window stood the dressing-tables and mirrors.

Mrs Ray Jefferson had it all to herself, as, wrapped in an enormous
sheet of Turkish towelling, she emerged from the processes of shampooing
and douche.  She laid herself down on one of the couches, and the
attendant, Morrison, threw another Turkish wrap over her, and left her
to the enjoyment of the coffee she had ordered, and which was placed on
one of the numerous small tables scattered about.

According to all rules of the baths, she should have rested calmly and
patiently on that couch, until such time as she was cool enough to don
her ordinary attire, but the little American, was of a restless and
impatient disposition, and of all things hated to be inactive.

The attendant had scarcely left the room before she raised herself to a
sitting position, and took a survey of her appearance in one of the
mirrors.  It did not appear to be very satisfactory.  She turned
abruptly away and reached some magazines from an adjoining table.  Armed
with these she once more sought her couch, and after tossing two or
three contemptuously aside, she at last seemed to find one periodical
that interested her.  She grew so absorbed in its contents, that she
scarcely heard the entrance of the beautiful woman who had so interested
her, and who now took the next couch to her own, and lay down in an
attitude of indolent grace that was quite in keeping with her
appearance.

"You seem interested," she remarked, as she glanced at the absorbed face
of her neighbour.

Mrs Jefferson looked up sharply.  "Well," she said, turning the
magazine round to read its title.  "This is about the queerest story I
ever read.  I wish people wouldn't write improbabilities that no one can
swallow."

"The question is rather what is an improbability?" answered her
companion.  "It is only a matter of the capacity of the age to receive
what is new.  A few years ago electricity was improbable, yet look at
the telegraph and the telephone.  Still further back, who would have
believed that railways would exist above ground and under ground, and
mock at the difficulties of rivers and mountains?  What have you
discovered strange enough to be called `improbable'?"

"Oh! it's a story of a man who gets out of his own body and does all
sorts of queer things, and then goes back to it again, just when he
pleases.  Finally, he falls in love with a woman as queer as himself,
and finding he has a rival, he just gets rid of him by force of
will-power.  However, the day they are to be married, the woman is found
dead in her bed.  It appears that she also could get out of her body
when she felt inclined, but she did it once too often, and couldn't get
back in time, so they buried her, at least they buried one of her
bodies; as far as I can make out she had _two_."

"And you think that improbable?" questioned the stranger calmly.

Her beautiful deep eyes were looking straight into the flushed excited
face beside her.  Mrs Ray Jefferson met their gaze, and was conscious
of an odd little unaccountable thrill.

"Certainly I do," she said.  "Who could believe that anyone can jump in
or out of their skin just as the fancy takes them?"

The stranger's beautiful lips grew scornful.  "Oh!" she said, "if you
like to put the subject in that light, it may well look ridiculous and
impossible.  Ignorance is always more or less arrogant.  It is man's
habit to fancy that all creation was made for him.  There are few things
of which he is so utterly ignorant, and of which he thinks so little, as
that mystery of _himself_ incarnated in the temporary prison-house of
flesh and blood.  Did he once realise what he might be--did he ever
raise his eyes from the glow-worm light of earth to the stupendous
glories of the sun of wisdom, he would know better than to cavil at what
you call `improbable.'  For in nature all things are possible, but man
has neither time nor patience to trace out their mysteries, or seek in
their development the key to those mysteries."

"Gracious sakes," muttered Mrs Jefferson to herself in alarm.  "I'm
sure she's a Rosicrucian or something of that sort.  It's interesting,
but uncanny.  I'm quite out of my depth.  I don't know what she means.
Do you really mean to say," she added aloud, "that this story might be
true; that you have two bodies and can slip from one to the other?"

A dark frown crept over the beautiful face.  "You talk as foolishly as a
child," she said with contempt.  "You know nothing of the subject you
are discussing, therefore anything I might say would sound
incomprehensible.  The grossness of the flesh stifles and kills the
subtle workings of the spirit.  To you life is only a pleasure ground,
and the more your own personal satisfaction is obtainable, the more you
cling to its spurious enjoyments.  If you once cut yourself adrift from
such follies, your eyes would be opened, your senses quickened, and you
would recognise possibilities and marvels that now are no more to you
than sunlight to the blind worm that burrows in the ground."  She
stretched out her hand and took the book from the passive hand of her
astounded companion, and glanced rapidly over its pages.

"`Light in Darkness.'  Ah, truly it is needed," she said, her eyes
kindling, her face glowing, until her beauty seemed more than mortal.
"But we shall never reach it till we learn to master the senses, to cut
the chains of worldly prejudice and conventionalism.  They are bold
teachers, these," and she tossed the magazine back to the still silent
critic of its contents.  "You would do well," she said, "to make
yourself acquainted with some of these subjects.  I think you would find
them more interesting than ball-rooms and Paris toilettes."

Mrs Jefferson recovered her tongue at that slight to her beloved
vanities.

"Tastes differ," she said coolly.  "I'm very well content with the world
as it is and with myself as I am.  I don't believe any good ever comes
of prying into subjects we're not intended to know anything about."

"I might ask you," said the stranger, with visible contempt, "how you
are so surely convinced of what we are intended to know, and what not?
There is no hard and fast rule laid down for us that I am aware of."

"Oh!" stammered Mrs Jefferson, with some confusion, "I'm sure the Bible
says that somewhere.  `Thus far shalt thou go and no further,' you know.
It is arrogant to attempt to penetrate the mysteries of the other
world.  When we go there we shall know them soon enough."

"How glibly you nineteenth-century Christians talk of the `other
world,'" cried the beautiful woman, with contempt.  She tossed back the
weight of her rich hair and sat up, looking like an inspired prophetess.
"Yet you acknowledge you know nothing of it.  Your priests cannot
explain it, so they take refuge in the plea that inquiry is
presumptuous.  Science cannot explain it.  Reason falters at the
threshold before the stumbling-block of its long-cherished ignorance
whose only legacy has been Fear.  And it is all because you live in
falsehood--because you are false to your _inner_ life, and think only of
the outer; because you are all in chains of superstition--of worldly
bondage, of family prejudices, and, above all, of self-delusion."

"Have you come to preach to us, then?" asked the little American
superciliously.  "There is little use in decrying a private or national
disease unless you are provided with a remedy."

"If an angel from Heaven came down to preach you would not believe!"
said the stranger, growing suddenly calm as she sank back on her pillow.
"No, I have no mission.  I am only one who has looked out on life and
learnt its bitter truths, and seen its vanity and folly repeated, with
scarce a variation, in countless human lives."

"Well," said the American, "the fact of that repetition seems rather as
if it were a law of human lives, don't it?  We find ourselves in this
world, and we must do as others do, and live as others live.  Of course,
I've read of people giving up all sorts of pleasures and comforts in
this life for sake of another, but to me it seems only a mild form of
madness.  For instance, there's this new sect that's sprung up, who are
going to revolutionise all creation--well, I've read heaps of their
books, I've spoken even to some of their members, but I confess
Theosophy seems as much of a jumble as any other creed.  Look at their
priests, their _yogis_, and _chelas_, and such-like humbugs!  They say
their Buddha is as divine as our Christ.  Maybe he is--to them!  But
what strikes me is the absurdity of trying to get into another life
while one has to live this.  Fasting and sitting under a tree, and
starving out all fleshly desires and impulses until the human body,
instead of being handsome and muscular as Nature intended it to be,
becomes a withered skeleton, subsisting on a few beans and a cup of
water.  Why, anybody could see visions and dream dreams, that lived a
life like that even for a year!  But I want to know what's the good of
it?  I suppose if we get out of our natural life before our time, our
place can't be ready for us in our next Karma, or whatever they call it.
So we would martyrise ourselves to no purpose.  These sort of people
seem to me to be trying to steal a march over others, wanting to get a
stage further on the road before the natural term of earth-life is over.
A nice world this would be if we were all at that game."

"You have certainly read to some purpose," said the stranger ironically.
"It is interesting to hear the deepest philosophy that has ever
occupied the human mind summed up and dismissed as ridiculous.  Let me,
however, first point out a few mistakes in your judgment of this new
`sect' as you call it.  In the first place it is not a sect in the
common acceptation of the word, but rather a universal philosophy
embracing all creeds, ranks, and denominations of men.  It lays not the
slightest stress on any of its followers martyrising their bodies as you
so glibly describe.  You might just as well say that the Christian
religion is only carried out by monks and nuns, because certain
enthusiasts prefer to cut themselves adrift from the vanities of life.
In all ages and in all religions there have been such enthusiasts.  Even
the prophets in your own Bible were men of this description, living in
caves, subsisting only on the fruits and seeds of the earth, and giving
themselves up to visions and dreams.  What else have your canonised
Saints done?  Yet they are worshipped by a vast community of
_apparently_ sensible beings, as holy.  It only shows that there are
certain minds capable of penetrating the uselessness of a purely worldly
existence, and finding it too hard to live a double life, that is to
say, spiritual and material (a life only possible to the modern clergy),
they seek refuge in seclusion and leave that outer life to those whom it
satisfies and suits.  As to the selfishness of such isolation, that is a
matter no alien mind can quite determine, for the greatest Example of
the religious life was strangely indifferent to human ties, nor ever
displayed the weakness of human affection for earthly relatives, thus
seeming to show that it is no sin to sacrifice earthly ties for a higher
and holier existence.  The disciples of the great Brotherhood are
voluntary enthusiasts, free from the claims of human relationship, and
offering themselves simply _as_ disciples.  They wrong no one by their
choice.  As for your last remark about endeavouring to steal a march on
our fellow-men by seeking a higher place in the next state of existence,
before we have done with this, I can only ask you to study something of
the laws and doctrines of theosophical philosophy before deciding such
an event is possible."

"Do you know much about them?" asked Mrs Jefferson curiously.

"I know that they teach man the truest sense of his own responsibility.
They prove to him an inexorable law by which he may lift himself from
the level of the brute to the majesty of the God he now blindly
worships."

"But so does Christianity," exclaimed Mrs Jefferson astounded.

For the first time the stranger laughed.

"And is not true Christianity the highest and purest philosophy?" she
said.  "Only it is preached--not practised.  Can you tell me that a
single Christian land in this nineteenth century era is one whit purer
or better in its spiritual or moral character than was Jerusalem a
thousand years ago?  Does it influence commerce, trade, governments,
laws--even civilisation?  If it did, not one rule or law that binds the
rotten fabric of civilised life together would stand for a single
moment.  Why?  Because no one would lie; no one would cheat; no one
would murder, either wholesale because of country prejudices, or retail
because of private animosities.  Everyone would be honest, charitable,
merciful, and unselfish.  You cling to a Faith that is almost barren of
good works.  You propagate it among ignorant savages whom you first rob
of their lands, and then convert with guns and brandy bottles.  How much
of the reception of Christianity is due to the _latter_ I will leave to
the revelations of the first honest missionary whose report is not
indebted to his income from the Society, a prospective pension, and his
own personal weakness for the laudation of his fellow men.  Show me a
human being who can be honest to a conviction in the face of scorn and
mockery, who never sought his _own_ interest in the profession he
embraced, but only the good of others for whom that profession was
ostensibly established; who would speak truth in the Courts of Law, the
House of Legislature, and the _salons_ of Society; who would write--not
for empty praise but from conviction--and follow art simply and purely
to ennoble the mind, not pander to the lust of the eye and the greed of
gold.  Show me such men and such a nation, and I will acknowledge
_there_ Christianity has found its seat and fulfilled the purpose of its
founder!"

"Oh," said the American, shrugging her shoulders with contempt, "of
course, you are talking arrant nonsense!  The thing's impossible.  The
world can't be turned into a monastery, and as long as people live they
will always be overreaching each other, and deceiving each other.  It's
not possible to be perfectly honest, or perfectly truthful."

"Then," said the stranger quietly, as she sank back on her cushions, "do
not blame even the poor _Yogi_ under his tree if he has turned away sick
and disgusted with the shams and vileness, and hypocrisies and evil, of
the so-called civilised world.  Remember that the country that holds him
and thousands as foolish and superstitious, is the country that your
boasted, civilisation has wrested from his race, and that _your_ example
as a Christian nation is ever before his eyes.  Let his conduct
determine it's influence!"

"Well," said Mrs Jefferson, "talk of sermons in stones!  Here's one in
baths!  I should like to know who you are.  Seems to me you know
everything, and have read everything, and seen most everything on the
face of the earth.  So few women begin to think of anything serious till
they've forgotten their looks, that you must excuse my calling you an
anomaly.  Now do tell me you'll change your mind and join us to-night in
the drawing-room.  It's quite as selfish as _Yogaism_ to keep talents
like yours in the background."

The beautiful face grew cold and proud.

"You must pardon me," she said, "if I venture to consider myself the
best judge of what you are pleased to call--talents.  They are not of an
order to benefit a hotel drawing-room."

"Oh!" said Mrs Jefferson, feeling somewhat snubbed.  "I'm sure people
would be delighted to hear you talk, even if you did rub some of their
pet foibles the wrong way.  I've quite enjoyed this morning, I assure
you.  You've diverted my thoughts from my own ailments, and stimulated
my digestion.  I feel like eating lunch for once.  And that reminds me I
must begin to dress.  My fringe takes a quarter of an hour to arrange."

She rose from the couch, her Turkish towelling drapery flowing far
behind her small figure.  Then she disappeared into her dressing-room.

When she emerged from thence, her fringe artistically curled, her face
becomingly tinged with pearl-powder, her dress and appointments all
combining to give her small person importance, and show a due regard to
the exigencies of fashion, she found the couch which the mysterious
stranger had occupied was vacant.  She loitered about in the hope of
seeing her emerge from one of the dressing-boxes, but she was
disappointed, and as the luncheon gong was sounding through the hotel
she reluctantly took her way through the carpeted corridors and turned
into the main entrance, her mind in a curious condition of perplexity
and excitement.



CHAPTER FOUR.

CONJECTURES.

Mrs Ray Jefferson, irrespective of a toilet of ruby velvet cut _en
coeur_, and a display of diamonds calculated to make men thoughtful on
the subject of speculation, and women envious on the subject of
husbandly generosity (even when connected with Chemicals), was quite the
feature of the Hotel drawing-room that night.  She was full of her
adventure of the morning, and her description of the beautiful stranger
lost nothing from the picturesque language in which she clothed her
narrative.

"It's very odd the Manager won't tell us her name," she rattled on.
"I've done my level best to find out, but it's no good.  I suppose she
pays too well for him to risk betraying her.  I'm sure she's a Russian
Princess; she has a suite with her, and carries musicians and sculptors,
and heaven knows who else, in her train."

It may be noticed that Mrs Ray Jefferson had only heard of _a_ sculptor
and _a_ musician, but she drifted into plurality by force of that
irresistible tendency to exaggerate trifles which seems inherent in
women who are given to scandal even in its mildest form.

People from all parts of the room gathered round her.  A few seemed
inclined to doubt her description of the stranger's personal charms, but
when she applied to Mrs Masterman for confirmation, that lady, who was
known to have a strict regard for truth in its most uncompromising form,
emphatically agreed with her.

"Beautiful!  I should think she was beautiful," she said, in her usual
surly fashion.  "But,"--and then came a series of those curious and
condemnatory phrases with which a woman invariably finishes her praise
of another woman's beauty, and which are too well known to be repeated.

"I did my best to try and persuade her to join us," continued Mrs
Jefferson, after duly agreeing with Mrs Masterman that perhaps the
stranger's hair was a shade too black, and her height too tall, and her
complexion too pale--and that there _was_ something uncanny in the
expression of the dark wild eyes, "more like the eyes of a horse than a
human being," was Mrs Masterman's verdict.  "But nothing would induce
her.  She says Society is all a sham.  That we don't really amuse
ourselves or enjoy ourselves, however much we pretend to!  My word!
doesn't she give it hot to everything.  Policy, religion, diplomacy,
worldliness, theology, art.  It seems to me she knows everything, and
has studied human life more accurately than the wisest philosopher I've
ever heard of."

"And did you discuss all those subjects during the course of a Turkish
Bath?" said a voice near her.

Mrs Jefferson started.  The gentleman who had spoken was a recent
arrival.  She only knew him as Colonel Estcourt.  He was a singularly
interesting-looking man, home from India on sick leave, and the maidens,
and wives, and widows, of this polyglot assemblage at the Hotel were all
inclined to admiration of his physical perfections, and to
dissatisfaction at a certain coldness and disdainfulness of themselves,
which, to use their mildest form of reproach, was "odd and unmilitary."

Mrs Jefferson started slightly.  "Oh, it's you, Colonel," she said.
"Yes, we did talk about all those subjects, and I surmise if all of you
people here heard her carry on against the way you live your lives,
you'd feel rather small."

"Did you?" asked Mrs Masterman unkindly.

The bath had not improved _her_ complexion, and her left foot was
paining her excessively.  These two facts had not combined to sweeten
the natural acerbity of her temper.  Mrs Ray Jefferson did not heed the
question, or the smile it provoked on one or two feminine lips.

"I should like to know who she is," she persisted.  "She's been in India
too.  I suppose you never met her, Colonel Estcourt?  No one could
forget her who had!"

That cold impassive face changed ever so slightly.  "India," he said,
"is a somewhat vague term, and covers a somewhat large area for a
possible meeting-place.  Your description, Mrs Jefferson, is
tantalising in the extreme to a male mind, but I fail to recognise its
charming original as any personal acquaintance."

"I suppose so," said the little American, discontentedly.  "I'm just
dying to know who she is, and therefore no one can tell me.  Seems I
shall have to call her `the Mystery,' until she condescends to throw off
this _incognita_ business."

"But we are sure to see her," interposed Orval Molyneux, the young poet.
"She must go out sometimes, I suppose."

"If you'll take my advice," said Mrs Jefferson brusquely, "you won't
try to see her, for it's my belief that she's not the woman any man can
look at and forget, and you poets are mostly impressionable."

"Such a warning is only adding zest to temptation," said Colonel
Estcourt, with a grave smile.  "You _really_ have aroused my curiosity
in no small degree.  But perhaps the mysterious beauty may not be so
obdurate as you imagined.  Why should she not show herself among us?  It
is contrary to all known rules of Nature for a beautiful woman to hide
herself from the admiration her charms would exact.  When those charms
are coupled with mental gifts of so diverse and unusual a nature as Mrs
Jefferson has described, the probability is that seclusion is only a
whim, unless indeed--"

He broke off abruptly.  A certain look of disturbance and perplexity
came into his deep grey eyes.

"Unless what?" queried Mrs Jefferson, sharply.  "You look as if you saw
a vision.  Unless she's committed a crime, were you going to say?  She
talked of some tragedy--something that had upset her life, and affected
her mental equilibrium."

"She said--that?"  His face grew suddenly very pale.  The firm mouth
quivered beneath the fair thick moustache that shaded it.

"Yes," said Mrs Jefferson.  "Do tell, Colonel.  What is it you suspect?
A mystery--a secret crime?  My, that would be interesting."

"Suspect!" he said, almost fiercely.  "How should I suspect?  What do
you mean?  I was only wondering if indeed she possessed one of those
rare minds, sufficient for their own happiness, and living an inner life
of which the world knows nothing, and which, even if it knew, it could
not comprehend."

"Ah," said Mrs Jefferson, quickly.  "Now this gets interesting.  That's
just the sort of way she talked, and I confess I got a bit out of my
depth.  But you, Colonel, you've come from the very land of it all.  Do
sit down and explain.  Is the world going to be turned upside down?  Are
we to have a new religion, or rather an old one brought to light, that
will upset what we've been hugging as truth for the last eighteen
hundred years.  We've been pretty crazy over spiritualism on our side of
the water, but I guess this new philosophy can just make our mediums and
_seance_-givers take a back seat.  Isn't that so?"

"My dear madam," answered Colonel Estcourt, gravely, "you really must
not call upon me to expound the doctrines of the East to the scoffers of
the West.  I know a little--a very little--of this school of philosophy;
but I am not vain enough to attempt an explanation of its profound
wisdom.  The mysteries of Nature demand the deepest and most earnest
consideration of the human mind.  Do you think I could presume to rattle
off a few explanations or give the key to certain problems just to
satisfy the vague curiosity of an idle hour.  I will only say one
thing--it is a thing that cannot be too often repeated and thoroughly
kept in memory.  Every life has to live out itself, and work out for
_itself_ the higher mysteries that are shut within its own
consciousness.  No one can do that for it, any more than they could take
its love, or its sorrows, or its misfortunes away, and bear them in its
place.  If humanity took that truth to heart, and lived according to the
higher instead of the lower instincts, the world would be a very
different place."

"But," objected a pretty feminine voice in the back-ground, "what about
the obligations of position and society?  I suppose the `higher
instinct' would tell us that amusements are a waste of time--vanity and
vexation in fact--yet even they have a good result, they give
employment, and help other folk to live.  And it's a pleasant relief to
be gay and frivolous.  It's awfully fatiguing to be grave and good.
Just look at us on Sundays.  We're all more or less cross and
disagreeable, and I'm sure no clergyman could honestly say that he
wasn't heartily sick of droning and intoning that same eternal form
embodied in the Church Service."

"The higher life," said Colonel Estcourt, gravely, "is not a matter of
form.  Far from it.  It is an unceasing and inexhaustible pursuit; it
has infinite gradations, and is full of infinite possibilities.  Its
tendency is to elevate all that is best, and eliminate all that is
worst, in man."

"Oh!" cried Mrs Jefferson with rapture, "I'm sure you ought to meet my
`Mystery.'  That's just her sort of talk.  I must say it sounds
beautiful; but I shouldn't think it was practicable.  It's a very hard
thing to change people's ideas.  When they've held them a certain time
they get used to them, and don't like the trouble of altering."

"True," said Colonel Estcourt, "and therein lies the secret of all the
misery and mistakes that have made the world what it is.  The few
enthusiasts and propagandists have always been confronted by that
mountain of inertness, prejudice, and indolence, which the aggregate
portion of all nations oppose to anything newer, or wiser, or better
than the sloth and ignorance of the past."

"Well," laughed Mrs Jefferson, "let's see what this new era will bring
about.  There's a grand opening for it, and it has this advantage--
people are much more dissatisfied with old creeds, and much more eager
for new, than they have ever been.  The reins are slack, if only there's
a firm and judicious hand to seize them."

"Suppose," drawled Mr Ray Jefferson, who had the rare virtue of being
an admirable listener to any controversy or discussion.  "Suppose, my
dear, we have a game of poker."

"Agreed," laughed his wife.  "This meeting's adjourned, Colonel
Estcourt.  Will you join us."

He shook his head.  "No," he said, "I'm going out on the terrace to
smoke."

"And meditate on the Unknown?" queried the little American.  "Perhaps
you'll see her at her window.  I wish you luck."

He did not answer, but his brow clouded and his face grew anxious and
absorbed.  In his heart those light words echoed with a thrill of
mingled pain and dread.  "If it should be," he said to himself.  "My
God--if it should be she?"



CHAPTER FIVE.

"LOVE."

The stars were gleaming above the dusky pine trees.  The soft December
air, mild as spring on that sheltered coast, scarcely stirred the
drooping boughs that overshadowed the terrace.  Colonel Estcourt lit his
cigar, and began to pace with slow and thoughtful steps beneath the many
lighted windows of the great building.  Mrs Jefferson's words haunted
him, despite his efforts to dispel them.  One of those windows belonged
to the room where this strange and beautiful woman might even now be
seated.  Why did he picture to himself the pale exquisite face--the full
dark eyes--the lovely rippling hair--as if they were charms already
recognised and remembered.  Why?--save that when he had heard their
description they had struck home to his memory with a shock of pain, and
a feverish dread that longed yet feared to find itself realised.  To and
fro--to and fro--he paced the terraced walk, and again and again his
eyes sought that long line of light above his head.

There was a strange stillness in the brooding air--that mysterious hush,
which is the music of night's gentle footsteps, and insensibly its
soothing influence stole over the unquiet of his restless thoughts--the
warring powers of soul and sense grew silent and at rest.

Then something--a sound sweet as song--yet without the vibratory passion
of a human voice--seemed to float out of the darkness and hold his ear
enchained like a spell.  It was the divinest beauty of music, divinely
interpreted, and it seemed to him as he listened that all the discord
and woe and misery that oppressed his earthly senses, disappeared and
died away into the very perfection of peace.

He stood there quite silent--quite motionless--waiting, so it seemed to
himself, for some fuller revelation to which these exquisite sounds were
but a prelude.

It was a matter of no surprise when he quietly lifted his dreamy glance
to the stone balcony above, and saw there, in the soft glow of light
from the rooms beyond, the fair form of the woman he had expected to
see.

A faint tremor of fear and apprehension thrilled his heart, but it died
away as a low remembered voice stole through the space that parted him
from a visible form he had never thought to see again.

"I told you we should meet.  But I scarcely thought it would be so soon.
Will you come up here, or shall I join you?"

The voice and greeting roused him.  He bared his head and bent low to
the speaker in a deeper homage than that of conventional courtesy.

"Is it really you, Princess?  And may I be permitted to join you?"

The mute sign of assent showed him also a flight of steps leading up
from the terrace to the balcony.  A moment, and he was by her side.

No ordinary greeting passed between them.  Perhaps none could have
conveyed what that long silent gaze did; seeming to go straight to the
heart of each, full of memories that time had softened, but sad with the
sadness that is in all deep human love.

"A strange meeting-place," she said.  "Yet why more strange than the
mountains of the East, or the lonely plains of the Desert, the steppes
of Russia, or the house-tops of Damascus?"

"You read my thoughts, as ever," he said.  "I must confess that it
seemed strange to see you here, treading the narrow path of English
conventionalism, after--after--"

"I know," she said.  "But life is full of the unexpected.  You do not
ask how these five years have been spent.  The years that have changed
the dreamy enthusiastic girl into a woman such as you see before you."

"I do not ask," he said, his voice vibrating beneath an emotion he could
not conceal, "because it can be no pleasure to me to learn.  Do you
forget what I told you?  Do you think that the memory of these five
years is a pleasant one for me?  Against my prayers, against my
warnings, you chose your own life.  Are you free--now?"

"No," she said, in a strange stifled voice, "never _that_--never while I
wear the shackles of humanity!"  She sank suddenly down in a low seat,
and buried her face in her hands.  "Oh," she cried, faintly, "if I could
tell you--if I only dared; but I cannot!  My bondage is deeper--my
chains are heavier.  Sometimes I think those years were only a dream--a
horrible, frightful dream--but then, again, I _know_ they were not."

"What do you mean?" he asked, his voice sharp with terror, for this
shame and remorse that convulsed her, and made her one with the common
weakness of her common womanhood, was something altogether different to
the supremacy she had always shown in her proud girlhood.

"I cannot tell you," she said, "I dare not."

"Do you forget," he said, severely, "that if I _wish_ to know, I shall
learn it?"

"Not now," she said, suddenly, and raised her face and looked calmly,
yet not defiantly, back at him with her great, sad, and most lovely
eyes.  "I have passed beyond your power," she went on.  "Beyond most
human influence, I might say--" then she shuddered and her eyes sank
again.  "But oh!" she cried, "at what a cost!--at what a cost!"

He felt as if his heart grew suddenly chill and stony.  "I believe you
are right," he said; "my power is gone--yours is the strongest now."

He was silent for a few moments.  "One question only," he then said; "I
don't wish to pry into your past.  It is enough that we have met--for
that would never have taken place if you had not needed me.  So much I
know.  Your marriage--was it as I foretold?"

"It was worse," she said, bitterly--"a million times worse!  Body and
soul, how I have suffered!  And yet, as I told you then, _it had to
be_."

"I did not believe it then," he said stormily; "I refuse to believe it
now.  Your misery was self-created.  You voluntarily degraded yourself.
What result could there be?  Only suffering and shame."

"The good of others," she answered mournfully.  "You cannot see it yet;
but I know--it was foretold me.  I did my work there.  Sometimes I hope
it is finished; but I do not know.  One can never tell; at any time the
summons may come again.  God help me if it does."

"Is your life in danger, then?" he asked, and again that chill and
horror seemed to thrill the pulses of his beating heart.

"My life!"  She lifted her eyes and looked back at his with something
intensely mournful in her gaze.  "As if _that_ mattered!  What is my
life to me now, any more than it was then?  Did I count the cost--did I
call it a sacrifice?  Life--the mere material actual life of the body--
has never weighed with me for one moment.  And yet," she added, in a
dull, strange voice, "I failed at the crucial test!  Failed!--I, who had
denied to myself all woman's weakness, all mortal love, all fleshly
vanities--failed!  I am no more now than the veriest beginner on the
path.  I, who deemed myself so wise!"

Then she rose and came close to him, and laid her white hand on his arm.
"That," she said, "is why I needed you again.  You can help me--you can
tell me where and how I failed."

That light touch thrilled his veins like sorcery.  He bent his head and
passionately kissed the white, soft hand.  "You failed, oh, my Princess!
because you are still mortal woman.  Thank Heaven for it!  You failed
because memory and love were still strong in your heart.  You failed--
and I am by your side once more.  Oh, let the past be forgotten!  Brief
is life, but love is its Paradise, and into that Paradise our feet once
strayed.  Fate stayed them on the threshold.  But now--now--"

She raised her white face.  "Do not deceive yourself," she said.  "You
have always loved me too well--but I--"

"Only _let_ me love you!" he whispered passionately.  "It is honour
enough.  All the wide earth holds no other woman such as you.  Having
once known you, there has never been a disloyal thought within my heart.
Read it--see for yourself."

"I read it," she said, "even while the music was sounding in your ears,
as you stood on the terrace there below; even while you moved amidst
that chattering, flippant throng, and heard what they said of me.  No,
dear friend.  You have nothing in that great frank, loyal soul to hide.
But I--there is something that whispers I shall only bring you
suffering.  I am not for mortal love.  True, I cannot see beyond, but
Fear meets me on the threshold.  The hour I gave myself to you would
bring you an evil I dimly realise.  I cannot foretell, and I cannot
avert it; but it is there.  It lurks like a hidden foe where our lives
should join...  No, no!--do not tempt me.  Happiness is not for me, as
we count it on the earth plane."

"And in the next I may lose you altogether.  Oh listen--listen, and let
the woman defy the priestess.  Give me your love, and, even with Death
as its bridal gift I shall receive it as the deepest joy of earth."

"There," she said sadly, "speaks the mortal.  Passion sways your senses.
You too will lose your powers--and for what?--a few brief years of
joy--a longer darkness--then the old weary round--the old sad effort to
climb the long stairway from the bottom rung that once you proudly
spurned.  It was not this that Channa taught us in the sweet peace of
our youth--it was not this for which our souls thirsted, and to which
our faces were set."

"Channa is dead, and to the dead all is peace.  Even he said that Life's
one good gift was Love."

"True, but not selfish love.  `The feet of the soul must be washed in
the blood of the heart.'  Love to all humanity--to the poor--the sad--
the suffering.  Love, even to the Fate that gives us sorrow and
misfortune.  Love to the eternal and immutable.  Love for all that is
purest and best in each life with which we mingle.  Such a love is not
sensual--not earthly.  It gives without necessity of return; it is the
soul's devotion, not the heart's impulse.  But you are not content with
loving me, you claim mine in return, and so far as I have lost or you
have gained a firmer foothold since last we met, so far you can compel
my lower nature to answer yours.  We have loved before, and unhappy was
our fate.  Once more we meet, and your cry is still for me.  And I--"

She ceased; her arms fell to her side.  Her face, lovely beyond all mere
mortal loveliness, looked back to his yearning, passionate gaze.  Had
she been temptress, devil, saint, there could have been but one answer
from the throbbing heart and leaping pulse of manhood.  He caught her to
his heart, and his lips drank from hers the sweetness that only earthly
passion drains from earthly love.

She did not resist.  She lay there like a white lily in the moonlight,
but her lips were cold as marble and her eyes held the mute sorrow of
despair, not the rapture of a granted joy.

------------------------------------------------------------------------



CHAPTER SIX.

ENCHANTMENT.

When a proud woman yields to the entreaties of a lover, she yields with
a grander humility, a more complete self-surrender, than one to whom
coquetry and conquests are natural attributes of vanity.

The Princess Zairoff, to whom men's admiration was as familiar as the
air of Heaven, who possessed rank and wealth and loveliness such as
dower few women, had yet never granted to one human being a sign of
tenderness, or unveiled, so to speak, the deep strange depths of her
strange nature, to any beseechment.

But now, for one brief hour she threw back the portals of emotion.  She
was a woman, pure and simple.  The man beside her was the one man in the
world to whom her memory had been faithful.  Boy and girl they had known
each other in years long past.  As boy and girl they had shared in the
same tastes, and been penetrated with the same desires for the Mystic
and the Unknown.

Living in a remote part of India under very careless guardianship, and
with no one to care for their pursuits, or remark them, they had made
the acquaintance of a learned and somewhat mysterious native, and from
his lips they first heard some hints of the wonders that nature reveals
to the earnest student.  As time went on they were separated--the boy
was sent to England, the girl remained in the East.  When they met again
he was a young lieutenant in an infantry regiment stationed at one of
the most popular stations of a popular Presidency, and she was the
reigning queen of the same station.  Again fate parted them.  Two years
went by.  Their next meeting was in Egypt, where she was travelling with
her guardian.

Julian Estcourt had learnt his heart's secret by then, but there was a
coldness, a strangeness, about the girl who had been his boyhood's
friend that kept him back from anything bearing the imputation of
love-making.

Much as they were together, long and frequent as were their talks, those
talks were yet curiously impersonal for their age and sex, and, however
much the young man's heart might throb with its hidden passion, there
yet lay between them a barrier, a restraint, light, yet strangely
strong, and his lips never dared betray the secret of his long-cherished
devotion.

Another separation--another meeting.  Time had worked changes in both.
She was a beautiful woman, proud, cold, queenly--he had acquired
strength of character, loftier ideals, and a sense of the value of
intellectual gifts, which had kept him singularly free from and
indifferent to, the temptations of the senses.  He had learnt to drink
mental stimulants with avidity.  He had made one or two brilliant
successes in literature, and was looked upon as a supremely "odd fish,"
by his brother officers.

That third meeting decided his fate.  He spoke out his love, spurred on
by a rivalry he had good cause to dread, but spoke to no purpose.
Calmly, though with a sorrow she did not attempt to disguise, she told
her old playmate and friend that her choice was made.  She was going to
marry the old, vicious, and fabulously wealthy Russian Prince, Fedor
Ivanovitch Zairoff.  She made no pretence of caring for the man whom,
out of a host of suitors, she had selected to wed.  When her young lover
stormed and upbraided her she only raised those wonderful stag-like eyes
to his face and said:

"I have a reason, Julian.  I cannot explain it.  I dare not say more.
Believe me I could not make you happy, _it would not be permitted_."

And having long ago learnt that arguments were utterly useless before
_that_ formula, he had to stand aside--to crush back a strong and
unconquerable passion--to see her pass from his sight and knowledge--and
to bear his life as best he could, with that feeling in his heart of
having staked all on one throw, and lost, that makes so many men
desperate and vicious.  That it did not make Julian Estcourt so was
entirely due to great strength of moral character, and a belief in the
responsibilities with which life is charged, and for the abuse of which
it is destined to suffer in future states or conditions, as well as in
its present.

If such belief were universally accepted and pursued, we should soon
cease to hear those ridiculous and humiliating phrases with which
popular favourites are extenuated for the reckless and disgraceful waste
of mind, energy, and usefulness, occasioned by some trifling
disappointment or misfortune.  There would be no more sins glossed over
as "sowing wild oats," and "having his fling," or "driven to the bad,"
because once an individual feels he is responsible to _himself_ for
undue physical indulgences--for laws of natural life set at naught, and
spiritual impulses disregarded--he will try to emerge from the slough of
evil, and he will learn with startling rapidity to value all joys of the
senses less and less.  There can be no high order of morality without
this sense of responsibility, for when a man feels he is moulding his
own character, forming, as it were, fresh links in the chain of
endurance, adding by every act and thought and word to that personality
he is bound to confront as _himself_, to re-inhabit as himself, and to
judge as himself, then life rises into an importance that words cannot
convey, but which the soul alone recognises and feels in those better
moments that are mercifully granted to each and all of us.

So Julian Estcourt took up his burden--saddened, aged, embittered
perhaps, but not one whit more inclined to squander the gifts of life or
the fruits of discipline than he had been in his dreamy, studious youth.

He neither sought distraction in evil and dissipated courses, nor death
by any of those foolhardy and rash exploits which have far too often
been glorified as "courage" or "pluck."

He was graver, more reticent, more studious than of yore, and he found
his reward, though few even of his intimate associates were aware of his
abnormal gifts, or his superior knowledge.  Such was the man who, still
in the prime of life's best years, still with thirst unslaked for that
one divine draught of love which, once at least, is offered to mortal
lips, stood now in the soft December moonlight by the side of the woman
he had worshipped for long in secret and in pain, and cried aloud in
triumph to his heart, "At last happiness is mine!"

His whole consciousness was pervaded with a sense of ecstasy that seemed
to make all past pain and regret sink into utter insignificance.  To
stand there by her side, to drink in that wonderful beauty of face and
form, was a joy that brought absolute forgetfulness of everything
outside and apart from its new and magical acquisition.  The world was
forgotten.  Even the possibility of a formal and imperative ceremonial
by which his newly-won treasure must be secured to himself at last,
barely flashed across his consciousness.  He did not trouble himself to
put it into words.  He listened to the brief disjointed fragments of her
speech--fragments which gave a dim picture of her life in these empty
years of division.  Now and then he spoke of himself.  She listened.
Once she turned to him with an impulse of tenderness strange in one so
cold and self-possessed.

"Ah!" she cried, softly, "I have made you suffer... but it was not my
will...  Oh, always believe that...  And I will give you compensation.--
I can promise it--now."

They seemed to him the sweetest words that ever fell from mortal lips,
and no less sweet--though infinitely puzzling--was that exquisite
humility with which she crowned the wonder of her self-surrender.  Yet
even as he heard his brain grew bewildered--his senses seemed to reel.
Strange thoughts and shapes seemed to hover around him, and all the
soft, dim space of night appeared a black and peopled horror.  For a
moment he felt that consciousness was forsaking him... that the shock of
this unexpected joy was beyond his strength to bear.  Dizzy and sick he
swayed suddenly forwards.--A cool hand touched his brow--a voice reached
his ear.  With a mighty effort he shook off the paralysing weakness, and
sank down by the side of his enchantress.

"Is it a dream?" he murmured, vaguely; "shall I wake to-morrow and know
you have mocked me again?"

"Nay, my beloved," she whispered; "this--is no dream...  Never again
shall I mock you.  I am but a woman now who loves.  Earth holds no
weaker thing."

------------------------------------------------------------------------

When Julian Estcourt entered the public drawing-room, nearly two hours
after he had left it, several curious eyes turned towards him.  The
card-players had finished their game and broken up into various groups.
A few men were yawning and apparently meditating a retreat to the
smoking-room.  No one seemed particularly energetic, but the entrance of
that tall soldierly figure struck a new note of interest in the languid
assemblage.  He seemed to bring--as it were--a breeze of vitality, a
sense of freshness and energy along with him from the starlit air and
the pine-scented woods.  His head was erect, his eyes shone with the
radiance of happiness, a certain sense of pride--of triumph--and yet of
deep intense content, was in his aspect and his smile.

Mrs Ray Jefferson, her spirits still unimpaired by losses at "poker,"
was the first to remark audibly on the change.

"Why, Colonel!" she said.  "Have _you_ been having a Turkish Bath?
Guess you look as fresh and perky as if you'd taken a new lease of
life."

He laughed.  "The only bath I have taken," he said, "is one of
moonlight.  You should all be out on the terrace.  Far healthier and
more enjoyable than these hot, gas-lit rooms, I assure you."

"The terrace," said Mrs Jefferson, looking at him with a sudden stern
accusing glance.  "Ladies and gentlemen, what did I tell you?  I--do--
believe--"

She paused dramatically, every eye turned fully and searchingly upon the
handsome face and erect figure so calmly and easily confronting this
sudden criticism.

"Well?" he said at last.  "What is it you believe?"

"You've seen--her," burst out Mrs Jefferson eagerly.  "Now Colonel, no
tricks--plain yes or no; I'm certain sure you've seen her--my Mystery.
Haven't you?"

"I will not pretend," he said, "to misunderstand you.  I have met an old
friend, and I hope soon to have the pleasure of introducing her to you
all.  Not with any mystery about her, as our American friend seems
determined to suppose, but simply as the Princess Zairoff--of whom you
may have heard before this."

There was a buzz--a stir--a confused murmur.  "Heard of her--I should
think so.  You never mean to say she's _here_?  I thought she was in
Russia--"

"Gracious!" almost shrieked Mrs Jefferson.  "Why it was her husband who
died so mysteriously, on the eve of that awful conspiracy.  You never
mean to say, Colonel Estcourt, that you know her.  Why she's one of the
celebrities of Europe, and to come here, to this quiet place--and
_incognito_?"

"Do you not think," he said, "that the fact of being quiet and unknown
would just be the one fact she would appreciate?  I hope I am not
claiming too much from your courtesy when I say that the privilege of
her society can only be obtained by a due regard to her wishes in that
respect.  She wishes only to be known as Madame Zairoff, here."

"I'm sure," exclaimed Mrs Jefferson eagerly, "I'm only too willing to
promise anything for the privilege of seeing her.  Isn't that the
general opinion also?"

There was a murmur of assent, specially eager on the part of the men.

"I can only assure you," continued Colonel Estcourt gravely, "that you
will not regret the slight inconvenience of repressing personal
curiosity, for Madame Zairoff is a woman whose gifts and graces are of a
marvellous nature and calculated to delight the most critical society.
As Mrs Jefferson told us, she is here for her health.  It is an
incident we cannot deplore if we are to benefit by her society."

"You'd better all look out for your hearts, gentlemen," laughed Mrs
Jefferson gaily and excitedly.  "I assure you I don't believe there's
another woman in the world like her.  I've seen her under trying
circumstances, and I give you my word of honour that a woman who can
preserve any charm of personal appearance under the ordeal of a Turkish
Bath--"

There came a discreet little cough from the neighbourhood of Mrs
Masterman.  The little American stopped abruptly.

"I'd best say no more," she said.  Then she laughed.  "All the same, if
you only could see us--"



CHAPTER SEVEN.

CURIOSITY.

There was suppressed but general excitement throughout the hotel all the
next day.

Someone had caught sight of the Princess Zairoff, who had driven out
after luncheon in a low open carriage with three horses harnessed
abreast in Russian fashion, that went like the wind.  Colonel Estcourt
was beside her, and curiosity was rife as to how he should have known
her, and whether accident only was responsible for the meeting of two
people, one of whom had come from Russia, and the other from India, to
this prosaic English nook, _for their health_.

Mrs Masterman sniffed ominously, as one who scents scandal and
impropriety in facts that do not adapt themselves to every-day rules of
life.  A few other women, suffering from one or other of the fashionable
complaints in vogue at this season, agreed with her, that "it certainly
looked very odd."  They did not specify the "it," but they were quite
convinced of the oddity.  It did not occur to them to reflect that there
was not the slightest reason for any mystery on the part of the
Princess, she being perfectly free and untrammelled, or that Colonel
Estcourt had been singularly gloomy and depressed before Mrs
Jefferson's graphic description of the mysterious beauty attracted his
notice.

There is a certain class of people who always shake their heads, and
purse up their lips, at the mere suggestion of "chance," or "accident,"
having a fortunate or happy application.  They do not apply the same
train of reasoning to the reverse side of the picture; the bias of their
nature is evidently suspicious.  These are the minds that refuse to
credit those little misfortunes of picnic and pleasure parties, by which
young people lose themselves in mysterious ways, and get into wrong
boats and carriages, and generally contrive to upset the plans of their
elders, when these plans have been framed with a deeper regard for
rationality than for romance.  Mrs Masterman belonged to this class,
which doubtless has its uses, though those uses are not plainly evident
on the surface of life; she spent the day in gloomy hints, and
mysterious shakes of the head, and insinuations that no good was ever
known to spring from a superabundance of feminine charms, which, in the
course of nature, must have an evil tendency, and be productive of
overweening vanity, extravagance, and even immorality.

Still, even evil prognostications cannot quell the fires of curiosity in
the female breast, and every woman in the hotel made her toilette with
special care on this eventful evening, as befitting one who owed it to
her sex to vindicate even the smallest personal attraction in the
presence of rivalry.  Colonel Estcourt was not at dinner, so his
presence did not restrain comment and speculation, and the tongues did
quite as much work as the knives and forks.

"I do wonder what sort of gown she'll wear," sighed Mrs Ray Jefferson,
who was attired in a "creation" of the great French man-milliner,
accursed by husbands of fashionable wives, and whose power is only
another note in that ascending scale of absurdity struck by the hands of
fashion.

"Perhaps she won't come down in the drawing-room at all," said Mrs
Masterman spitefully, after listening for some time to the remarks
around her.  "Colonel Estcourt did not specify any particular night."

"Oh, I'm sure she'll come," said Mrs Jefferson, whose nature was
specially happy in always assuring her of what she desired.  "I've got
an impression that she will--they never fail me.  You know I've a
singularly magnetic organisation.  A great spiritualist in Boston once
told me I only needed developing to exhibit extraordinary powers.  But I
hadn't the time or the patience to go in thoroughly for psychic
development.  Besides it's really a very exacting pursuit."

"Exacting rubbish!" exclaimed Mrs Masterman impatiently; "I can't stand
all that bosh about higher powers, and developing magnetism.  Of course
there are a set of people who'd believe anything that seemed to give
them a superior organisation; it's only another way of pandering to
human vanity.  Spiritualism is perfect rubbish.  I've seen and heard
enough of it to know.  I once held a _seance_ at my house, just to
convince myself as to its being a trick or not, I was told that the
medium could materialise spirit forms.  I, of course, asked some people
to meet him, and we selected a room and put him behind a screen as he
desired, and there we all sat in the dark, like so many fools, for about
half-an-hour.--"

"Well," interposed Mrs Jefferson eagerly, "and did you have any
manifestation?"

"Oh, yes," laughed the gouty sufferer grimly, "a very material one
indeed.  By some accident the medium knocked down the screen just after
we'd seen a spirit face floating _above_ it.  In the confusion some one
struck a light, and there was our medium--standing on the chair without
his coat, and wrapping some transparent India muslin about himself,
which had been dipped in phosphorus I believe, so that it gave out a
curious shimmering light in the dark.  You may suppose I never went in
for materialistic _seances_ again."

"Still," said Mrs Jefferson, "although you may have been tricked, it
doesn't stand to reason that spiritualism _is_ trickery.  I've come from
the very core and centre of it--so to speak.  I've been at more
_seances_ than I could count, and I've seen tests applied that _prove_
the manifestations are genuine.  Still there are heaps of professional
mediums who are not to be depended on, I grant.  If you want to know the
truth of spiritualism, you can always work it out for yourself.  That's
quite possible, only it's a deal of trouble."

"I don't believe in it," reiterated Mrs Masterman stubbornly.  "All
mediums are cheats and humbugs."

"Oh!" said Mrs Jefferson.  "If it comes to exceptions laying down the
rule, where are we?  The other day a clergyman was taken before the
courts for drunkenness, but I suppose you're not going to say all
clergymen are drunkards.  A doctor poisoned a patient by mistake, but
surely we're not to class our dear medical men as poisoners and
murderers on that account.  It's just the same with any abnormal or
extraordinary facts that set up a new theory for investigation.
Impostors are sure to creep in, and the lazy and the indifferent and the
sceptical call their exposure `results.'  Depend on it we don't half
investigate subjects now-a-days, and we suffer for it by giving place
and opportunity for the development of a certain class of beings who
prey on our credulity, and make profit out of our indolence and
superstition."

"There's something in spiritualism, you bet," drawled the nasal voice of
Mr Ray Jefferson.  "I've had messages written to me, and things said
that no third person could possibly have known about."

"Ah, slate writing," sneered Mrs Masterman.  "I've seen that too.  Just
another trick."

"How do you explain that?" asked Mrs Jefferson quickly.

"Well, this way.  I went to two or three different mediums so as to test
them all.  I found they had no objections to bringing your own slates
and writing your own questions, but while they held the slate under the
table they kept you talking to distract your attention, and from time to
time they got convulsive jerks and movements by which it was quite
possible for them to see what was written.  Then you heard a scratching
(the medium probably had a little bit of pencil in his finger-nail), and
your answer was given you.  Well, let that pass for what it's worth, but
I always noticed the medium asked if I wouldn't like a message, and when
I said `yes,' he brought out _his own slate_."

"But," said Mrs Jefferson, "didn't he let you examine it first?"

"Oh yes, and wiped it over with a damp cloth.  Then it was held under
the table, and in a few seconds covered with `spirit-writing.'  But I
found out afterwards that you can buy slates with a _false cover_, this
cover fits within the frame and is exactly like the other side of the
slate, but, _your spirit-message is already written_, a touch makes the
cover drop off, the medium covers it with his foot in case you should
look under the table, out comes the slate, and there you are!"

"On," said Mrs Jefferson angrily, "it's plain you've only been to the
charlatans and impostors of spiritualism.  Why, I've had a message
written in a _locked_ slate while I held the key and held the slate too.
What do you say to that?"

"I've only your word for it," said Mrs Masterman sarcastically.  "My
slates were never locked."

"And I've only _your_ word for what you've told us," answered Mrs
Jefferson with rising wrath.  "I suppose my evidence may be as
trustworthy."

"Well," interposed another voice, "my view of spiritualism is, that it's
an intensely humiliating idea after you've done with this world to be at
the beck and call of any other human being who can make you go through a
variety of tricks, as if you were a performing dog, in order to convince
people still in the body that there is another life.  If that other life
permits us to come back here and play tambourines, and knock furniture
about, and write silly and ambiguous messages on slates, I don't--
myself--think it's a very desirable one."

This view of the question produced a blank silence.  It proceeded from a
gentleman who was supposed to be a little "odd"--partly because he spoke
seldom, and then with a startling originality, on any subject of
discussion.

Mr and Mrs Ray Jefferson looked at one another, somewhat dismayed.
Mrs Masterman smiled triumphantly, the young poet murmured something
vague about the inestimable beauty of sublime "mysteries," but the
subject was temporarily extinguished.  The only side hitherto considered
had been the `phenomenal,' and people--once the idea was originated--
felt really inclined to think that after all, when they quitted the
earth plane, it would not be a very elevating prospect to find
themselves dragged back to give _seances_ and perform tricks like a
French poodle in order to convince their friends and relatives that they
were _still in existence_!

The conversation only went on in subdued murmurs, and presently there
was a feminine move towards the drawing-room.

Once there the great subject as to whether Madame Zairoff would or would
not appear that evening, was again freely discussed.  That it was an
equally interesting probability to the sterner sex was soon made evident
by the unusual alacrity with which they joined the circle.  They broke
up into groups and knots, scattered through the length of the handsome,
brilliantly lighted room, but a curious restlessness was apparent; no
one settled down to cards or music.  Even the "odd" individual moved
about and dropped cynical remarks along the route of his progress,
instead of sitting down to backgammon as was his wont.  A few other
misguided individuals, of the male sex, offered and accepted bets _sotto
voce_ on the chances of the Unknown appearing.

At last, when expectation had been strained almost to breaking point, it
was set at rest.  The doors were thrown open, and, lightly leaning on
Colonel Estcourt's arm, appeared Mrs Jefferson's much talked of, and
beautiful "Mystery."



CHAPTER EIGHT.

SURPRISE.

An involuntary hush fell upon the whole assemblage.  Not a man or woman
there but felt their breath come a little quicker, their hearts beat
with suppressed excitement, as that perfect figure, with its magical
indolent grace, swept slowly through the room and into their midst.

It was the usual homage paid to Princess Zairoff, for she possessed that
rare and delicate mixture of indifference, languor, and disdain that is
in itself a distinction, and makes ordinary womanhood and beauty
suddenly feel coarse and commonplace.

She paused before Mrs Ray Jefferson, and greeted her with a soft
indescribable grace, and after a few minutes' conversation permitted
herself to be introduced to a few of the group around the little
American.  That perfect ease of manner, which held not a vestige of
condescension, soon exerted its charm.  One after another drew near that
envied circle, anxious to pick up some stray pearl of speech from those
lovely lips.  The women forgot to be envious, because she never for one
moment forgot or ignored them.  Even gouty Mrs Masterman found that her
ailment had been remembered, and was sympathetically enquired about in a
way to which she was entirely unaccustomed.  The poet talked as if he
drew in inspiration with every glance from those starry eyes, the
musician at her request moved to the piano and played some of his "Music
of the Future," and it no longer seemed incomprehensible.  A sense of
exhilaration, of pleasure, of content, spread through the group, and
animated discussion, and gave even ordinary conversation a sudden grace
and charm.

It was to be expected before the evening was over, that that
conversation would ascend by natural gradations from the ordinary to the
intellectual, yet no one could tell exactly how or when it began to do
so, any more than they could describe the strange yet clear logic by
which this one woman set to rights various perplexing problems, and gave
the key as it were to a nobler and higher order of eclectic philosophy
than they had yet ventured upon.

To Mrs Ray Jefferson, that discussion in the Baths had acted as the
stimulus of an olive to the palate.  She was all eagerness to resume it.

"I hope, Madame Zairoff," she said, in her brisk, lively, fashion, "that
you will give me a little enlightenment about what you said yesterday.
This is just a leisure time with most of us, and I suppose mental
culture is not incompatible with hygienic pursuits."

"Assuredly not," said the Princess, smiling.  "The more you cultivate
the mind the less you feel or care for the ailments of the body, and to
give those ailments even occasional insignificance, is to first forget,
and then banish them.  If you draw your mind away from the thought of
pain, you cease to feel pain."

"But that would require a far stronger mental capacity than we possess,"
said Mrs Masterman.  Then she suddenly remembered that she had not felt
a single gouty twinge the whole evening, because her mental
consciousness had been unusually excited.  This remembrance made her
grow suddenly thoughtful and attentive to the discussion.

"I think," said Princess Zairoff, gently; "that we all make a great
mistake in setting any absolute limit to our mental capacity.  It is
quite within our own power to dwarf or extend it.  If we are content to
rest satisfied with a small amount of knowledge we can do so, and even
cease to suffer in our own self-esteem by feeling we are stupid, or
indolent, or ignorant.  Our perceptions are gradually blunted, and
society is kind enough to case most of its remarks and opinions in a
sugar-coating, so that the real truth never reaches us.  We gradually
find, then, that an opinion that soothes our personal vanity and
self-esteem is a very pleasant opinion.  So long as we cherish that
falsehood, so long do we blunt our faculties of progress.  Now it seems
a very extraordinary thing to me, who have long been accustomed to
investigate and direct the psychic side of nature, to find such numbers
and numbers of people who don't believe in _any psychic laws at all_,
far less care to investigate them as knowledge.  The reason is simply
this, that they all are convinced that _one_ trivial, petty earth-life
is the one life for which they were created and are responsible,
therefore the only one they feel bound to investigate."

She paused and looked at the circle of grave and wondering faces.

"You have heard of the law of Karma, I suppose?" she said.

There was a murmur, vague, spontaneous, or doubtful, according to the
amount of comprehension excited by the question.

"It is a pity," resumed the Princess, "that it is not more generally
understood.  What is the difficulty?  I learnt it in my childhood just
as your English children learn their catechism.  You have taken up the
doctrine of Evolution very strongly, but Karma is its very leading law,
so to speak.  Man is perpetually working out and developing afresh the
energies, aspirations, and character with which his spirit was
originally endowed.  He becomes, as it were, the product of the better
part of himself, that struggles to the surface again and again during
periods of incarceration in the flesh."

"Then you would convey that we all live over and over again?"

"Most certainly.  It is the only rational way to account for the
injustice, the sorrows, and the miseries of earth.  It gives long
opportunities for the modification of character; it acts as retribution
to the evil and the vicious and the selfish; it gives a far deeper sense
of responsibility than the shallow acceptance of mere creeds, because a
man's good or evil deeds become a series of actions with inevitable
consequences.  If you teach him that he can throw off the results of a
bad life, and of all it has entailed upon his fellow man, by a brief
spell of penitence, or a blind, irrational faith in the sacrifice of a
Being he has neglected and ignored during the greater part of that life,
you really are only pandering to the selfish and cowardly side of his
nature."

A little shudder ran through the group at these bold words.  Mrs Ray
Jefferson lifted her head and cast glances of triumph about, as one who
should say, "I told you she would shock you all!"

There was scarcely a man or woman there who did not attend church on
Sundays, and who had not managed to make a comfortable compact between
the tenets of religion and the demands of social and worldly pleasures.
Not one who, if taken to task on the momentous subject of a spiritual
future, could have given any rational explanation of why he or she held
certain vague ideas on the subject of salvation, or put off the deeper
consideration of the subject to some indefinite period when they would
have had their fill of vanities, and lost either the means or the desire
to pursue them.

And yet there was a subtle _frou-frou_ of rustling skirts as the women
drew slightly away, and a decided appearance of discomfort on the faces
of the men, to whom an unpleasant truth was suddenly and sharply
conveyed, and who found themselves strangely powerless to combat, or
argue out its real meaning.



CHAPTER NINE.

DISCUSSION.

Colonel Estcourt came to the rescue.

"No doubt," he said, "the subject and this view of the subject seems a
little strange to our friends here.  We must remember they have not been
accustomed to hear it freely discussed, as we have."

"It _is_ strange," said Mrs Jefferson, rallying her energies, "but we
should not shirk its consideration for that reason.  I quite agree with
Madame Zairoff that people don't think half seriously enough of their
real natures, the mysterious inner _something_ which we all feel we
possess, but whose voice we stifle in the din of the world.  And yet,"
she added, sighing pathetically as she looked at the great Worth's
`creation,'--"the vanities are very pleasant.  Why should we turn
anchorites?"

"There is not the slightest necessity to do that," said the princess,
smiling at the unuttered thought she had read in that glance.  "Far from
it.  The gravest duties of life are generally those that meet us in the
world, and are called forth by our actions in that world.  All lives are
not meant to be isolated, and certainly none for the whole period of
earth life.  A person would have to be very sure that he was _free_ to
cut himself adrift from his fellows before he would even be permitted to
do it."

"Permitted!" echoed Mrs Jefferson, rather vaguely.  "But by whom?"

"The teachers of occult science," answered the Princess Zairoff.

"But who are they?" exclaimed the little American.

"That I cannot tell you," she answered, gravely.  "They exist, and their
influence is already beginning to make itself felt.  But it would be a
poor triumph to unveil the highest wisdom that humanity can ever learn,
in order to satisfy the idle and the curious, and the lovers of marvels.
Those who desire to learn can always do so, but nothing is forced upon
you, or even obtruded.  I should not have opened my lips on the subject
had you not expressed a desire to hear something about it."

"I suppose," said Mrs Jefferson, eagerly, "you yourself are a believer
in occultism?"

"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.

Could that more than mortal beauty ever really be his--his in the common
prose of possession that can never be disassociated with marriage--the
prose that is to the delicate subtle beauty of love, what the rough
touch is to the wings of the butterfly, the bloom of the grape?

For a moment the thought seemed like sacrilege.  He could have fallen at
her feet in a sudden adoration of the divine beauty and purity of
embodied womanhood.  "If ever she has lived before," he said in his
heart, "it must have been as a vestal virgin, or a martyred saint.
Where in the world is such another woman?"

The voice of the cynical philosopher broke on his ear and disturbed his
thoughts.  "Madame, it is my humble opinion that you could convince us
of anything you desired.  Happy are those who have so charming a
disciple to expound their doctrines, happier still the fortunate few to
whom those doctrines are to be expounded by lips so lovely and a heart
so wise."

Ere the circle had quite recovered from its astonishment at hearing a
speech so flattering uttered by their surly Diogenes, they had parted to
make way for the beautiful stranger, and the last gleam of her snowy
robes had floated through the doorway, as a cloud melts into the
darkness of descending night.

There was a sort of long-drawn breath, a feeling as of long tension
suddenly set free, a turning as if by one accord to one another.  Then--
well, then all the tongues leaped into action, and for the remainder of
that evening, like Thackeray's folk "At the Springs," they talked, and
they talked, _and they talked_.



CHAPTER TEN.

PREMONITION.

When the Princess Zairoff was in the privacy of her own boudoir, she
turned to Colonel Estcourt in a sudden appeal:

"Why did you make me go, Julian?" she said.  "I knew I should only shock
them.  I can't ever put up with that languid ignorant curiosity."

"I think it will do them good to be shocked," he said, with a smile.
"Give them something to think of beside their ailments.  And I had a
special reason," he went on with a deeper note of tenderness in his
voice--"I do not wish you to shut yourself away as you have been doing.
You will grow morbid and dissatisfied with life.  I want you to take a
healthy interest in it once again."

She had thrown herself on a low cushioned lounge before the bright wood
fire.  He took a chair beside her.  She seemed to lapse into profound
thought, and he watched her beautiful grave face with adoring eyes.

"I wish," she said suddenly, "one could live a free, simple,
uncriticised life.  Do you remember the old days among the wild hills?
The cool grey dawns... the sharp sweet air... the long gallops over the
rough roads by the rice fields... the strange temples... the songs of
the snake-charmers?  Ah, we were happy then, Julian, happier than we
ever realised."

"May we not be still happier?" he said earnestly.  "Life has a graver
and a wider meaning, it is true, but that should only give us a deeper
power of appreciation."

A strange smile touched her lips; a smile of mystery, and of dreamy,
unfathomable regret.

"We shall never be happier," she said, "than we were then.  I have
always felt that... yes, I know what you would ask.  Did I love you
then?  Yes, Julian, with all my heart and soul... and yet--and yet--I
could have been nothing more to you than a sister, a friend.  There was
a purpose in my marriage."

She ceased speaking.  For a moment her eyes closed, her head sank back
wearily on the soft cushions.

Presently she opened them, and met his anxious gaze.  "No, I did not
faint," she said.  "But, why I know not, that sense of blankness and
dizziness always comes over me when I speak on that subject.  There is
something I wish, yet dread, to remember--but, just as I am on the point
of grasping it, there is a blank."

"Do not speak of that time," he said passionately.  "I hate to think you
were the wife of that man--it was sacrilege... you--my pure-souled
goddess."

"He was a bad man," she said.  "But, up to a certain point, I could
always escape and defy him.  He was a coward at heart, and he was afraid
of me."

Then suddenly she stretched out her arm and touched his shoulder with a
timid, caressing movement.  "You need not be jealous of those years, my
beloved," she said softly.  "No man would, who knew them and valued them
for what they were to me."

He sank on his knees, and folded his arms about her.  "Ah, queen of
mine," he said, "it is only natural that I should be jealous of the
lightest touch, or look, or word, that were once another's privilege.
Therein lies the only sting in my happiness--"

"Does not that prove it is of earth--earthly?" she said, as her deep
mournful eyes looked back to his own.  "I believe, Julian, it would be
better, even now, if we were to part.  I have always that dread upon my
soul, that I am destined to bring you suffering--misfortune--"

"Bring me what you will," he interrupted passionately, "but do not speak
of parting!  Rather suffering and trial at your hands, oh, my life's
love, than the greatest peace and prosperity from any other woman's!"

"I wish you loved me less," she said sadly.  "But I am not forbidden to
accept your love now; only, I have warned you, do not forget.  And
now--" she added suddenly: "Put me to sleep... it is so long, so long,
since I have known real rest, such as you used to give me."

He rose slowly and stood beside her, as she nestled back amidst her
cushions.  A strange calm and chill seemed to fold him in its peace, and
the throbbing fires of pain and longing died slowly out of vein and
pulse.  He laid one hand gently on the beautiful white brow; his eyes
met hers, and the glance seemed like a command.  The lids drooped, the
long, soft lashes fell like a fringe on the delicate, flushed cheek.
One long, sobbing breath left her lips; then a beautiful serenity and
calm seemed to enfold her.  Like a statue, she lay there, motionless,
stirless; lifeless, one would have thought, save for the faint regular
breath that stole forth from the parted lips.

Julian Estcourt stood for a moment in perfect silence by her side.  Then
he moved away, and, drawing aside the _portieres_ which separated the
boudoir from the adjoining room, he called softly to her maid.
"Felicie," he said, "your mistress will sleep for two hours; see that
she is not disturbed."

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Once out in the cool night-air, Julian Estcourt gave the rein to thought
and memory.  The march of events had been rapid.  It seemed difficult to
realise that he really stood in the light of an accepted lover to the
woman who, but the previous day, he deemed at the other end of the
world... difficult to realise that she loved him--and had loved him
through all the blank, desolate years of absence and suffering they had
both endured.

Her warning came ever and again like a living voice across the fevered
train of his thoughts.  But he was no whit more inclined to listen to it
here, in the calmness and soberness of solitude, than when her own lips
had spoken it, and the charm of her own presence had swept away prudence
and self-restraint.

"It may not be wise," he said in his heart, "but I have not the strength
to deny myself the only happiness I have ever pictured as possible.  It
is not as if I had frittered away my life on other women--on mere
sensual pleasures.  From my boyhood up to the present hour her power has
been the same--her charm for me the same, I love her.  That says all,
and yet not half enough.  Human nature is weak.  I had dreamt of another
life--of a higher and nobler field of duty, apart from the selfish joys
that are inseparable from mere human ties--but I can yield that dream up
without a regret.  I can turn back from the threshold I have crossed...
May there not be a purpose in our meeting like this--in the prospect of
our union?  If the time has come to teach, and to speak out boldly what
has long been veiled in mysticism and doubt, where could a teacher so
eloquent be found, or one whose natural gifts and loveliness could make
those teachings of so much weight? and I--I, too, can help and protect
her.  Our souls need not descend from the spiritual level they have
attained--they may meet and touch, and yet expand in the duality of
perfect love and perfect comprehension.  It is a glorious thought," and
he lifted his eyes to the starry heights, that to him held all the
mystery of peopled worlds--and were no mere pin-pricks of light, created
to illuminate _one_.  "A beautiful thought--God grant it may be
realised!"

But even as his eyes rested on the solemn splendour of the heavens--even
as the human passions of the senses grew stilled beneath the loftier
aspirations of the soul--even as that involuntary prayer sprang from
heart to lips, some inner consciousness whispered like a warning
voice--"_it cannot be_."

He started as if that sound were audible.  A cold and sudden terror
swept over his body like a chilling wind.  "Bah," he cried.  "What a
nervous fool I am!  Is this all my love has done for me--made me like a
frightened child, starting at shadows?"

He turned abruptly, and went within to seek his own room.

It was just midnight.  Lights were being extinguished in the public
rooms and corridors--silence and sleep were settling down upon the vast
building.

Colonel Estcourt exchanged his evening clothes for the comfort of
dressing-gown and slippers, and then threw himself into an easy chair
before the fire which was blazing brightly and cheerfully in the grate.

It was the conventional hotel bedroom.  A dressing-table stood in the
window; the bed, curtained and draped, looked inviting in its corner.  A
lamp stood on a small table littered with books and papers; an array of
pipes and cigar-holders were strewn carelessly on the marble
mantelpiece.  A sense of brightness and commonplace comfort permeated
the atmosphere, and were sensibly soothing after the chill of the cool
December night.

He took a cigar from his case and lit it, and threw himself back and
smoked at his ease.

As he did so, he heard a clock in the distance strike the quarter after
midnight; mechanically he counted the strokes.  "She will wake now," he
said, half aloud.  The sound of his voice startled himself in the
stillness of the room.  As its echoes died away he glanced nervously
round.  Then his face paled to the hues of death, his eyes dilated.
Midway in the room a veiled misty figure seemed to float--transparent
and yet distinct--and he saw its arm stretched out towards himself with
a sudden impressive gesture.

He tossed the cigar into the grate, then bent his head as if in
submission.

"Is it the summons--at last?" he said, faintly.

If answer there was, it was audible only to himself.  To anyone looking
on, it only seemed as if a sudden dreamy lassitude had overtaken him;
his head sank back against the chair, his eyes closed, his face grew
calm and peaceful, and, like a tired child, he fell asleep.



CHAPTER ELEVEN.

THE DREAM.

As Julian Estcourt's eyes closed, it seemed to him that with a sudden
sharp spasm of pain he tore himself away from that sleeping sentient
portion of humanity which was his representation, and then, without
effort or consciousness of his own, he seemed floating swiftly along
over a dark and misty space.  A great sea tossed and moaned beneath him.
He felt that someone was beside him, but he had no desire to question
its personality.  Now and then lights flashed through the dusky shadows
which enveloped him, and as they flashed he saw vivid pictures of plains
and cities and mountains.

Over one such city, bathed in the clear lucid flame of the full moon, he
seemed to pause.  He saw bridges, piles of buildings, dark flowing
canals, a strange medley of streets, some broad and beautiful, others
dark, narrow and pestilential, reeking with the fumes of dram-shops.

There was snow on the ground, sleighs were gliding swiftly to and fro.
People spoke but seldom; an air of restraint, of fear, of rebellion
impressed him, as the furtive glances and brief whispers became pregnant
with meaning.

Gradually, as he moved through the hurrying crowd, he was conscious of a
name constantly on their lips.  It was muttered by the voices of tipsy
men reeling from their vile dens of intoxication, by the lips of painted
women as they drew their furs around their tawdry finery, by the
artisans with their pinched faces and hungry eyes, by all the classes to
whom life is a bitter struggle with poverty and necessity.

To and fro he seemed to move, without haste, and yet with the rapidity
of thought.  In the magnificence of gilded saloons, in the snow-covered
street, in the haunts of poverty and vice, always and always that one
word was tossed to and fro in every accent of hate and opprobrium.  And
when in wonder he turned to the shape floating still beside him, and
would have questioned the meaning of that word, it stayed the question
on his lips with a mute gesture of silence.

Then, strange to say, he seemed to gather into his own consciousness a
sense of deep implacable hatred.  A hatred that thrilled the air as with
poisoned breath, and beat in the pulses of living men to whom existence
was brutalised by tyranny and vice.  The sense of this awful murderous
Hate, at last grew terrible as a burden, so fully and consciously did he
recognise it, so clearly did he see of what it was capable, and so
mysteriously did it seem to breathe about the very air through which he
moved.

It filled the pulses of the night with a horror from which he shrank
aghast, it stretched a blood-red hand over the white drifts of unsullied
snow, it painted out the brilliant hues of luxury, and threw yet darker
shadows over the sad homes of want and misery and crime.

And more and more he strained every nerve to catch the meaning of that
word which was its embodiment, and again and again he failed.

Suddenly the scene changed.  He was in a poor chamber, barely and
miserably furnished.  It lay in the centre of a pile of buildings facing
a half-frozen canal.  It seemed to him that the building consisted of
hosts of small tenements, all swarming with human life, but he had
passed up the common stairway seemingly unnoticed, and entered this
special room.

It was tenanted by two people.  An old woman of some three-score years,
with a thin worn face and grey hair banded over her hollow temples.  She
was thinly clad, and had an old tippet of yellow fur over her shoulders.
She sat near the stove.  Before her stood a young man in the dress of a
Petersburg student.  They were talking low and earnestly.  Again that
word reached him, again the full sense of its meaning eluded his grasp.

Suddenly the comprehension of the scene became clear to him.  He saw
they were mother and son, that he was relating some incident to her with
a suppressed enthusiasm that yet made itself audible in his deep,
thrilling tone, and visible in the glow and sparkle of his eye.

"She is an angel," he said at last.  "We do well to trust her--but what
a risk, think of it, mother--five hundred lives, and only a few hours to
decide their fate."

The woman's face grew white, her feeble limbs shivered as with an ague
fit.  "My son," she moaned, "my only one--and you, too, may be
sacrificed.  Oh, unhappy country, unhappy fate that makes it ours!  But
you are right.  The Princess is an angel of goodness; she will save us.
She has said it."

They both turned involuntarily towards a small image, before which a
lamp burned.  He saw them kneel hand in hand before it; then the room
faded into darkness--he was in another place now.

A sense of luxury, of perfume, of dreamy warmth, and then he saw,
opening before him in a vista of exquisite colour, a suite of softly
lighted chambers.  They seemed to glow like jewels, each perfect in the
richness and loveliness of its setting, and at the farthest end of one
of them a woman reclined on a couch of white furs.  She was wrapped in a
loose gown of thick white silk, bordered also with snowy fur, and her
lovely hair was unbound, and fell in a long trail of dusky splendour
over the colourless purity of her surroundings.

Her eyes were wide open, and full of a fear that was almost horror, and,
as if to account for it, he seemed suddenly to hear, coming through the
fragrant stillness of those virginal chambers, the dull heavy step of a
man.  She raised herself on one lovely bare arm, her hand went to her
heart, then slowly her eyes were upraised as if in some dumb prayer for
strength.  A strange frozen calm came over the perfect features.  The
face looked as if carved in marble.

Nearer and nearer came the heavy step, reeling and uncertain now, yet
stumbling with drunken obstinacy towards some goal to which the leaden
senses pointed their brutal desires.

Up to this time, Julian Estcourt had only been conscious of a passive
blind submission to the force controlling him; but now power seemed to
thrill him, desire seemed struggling to life, the will awakened from its
lethargy, and a god-like strength and force seemed to spring into life,
held in check but for a moment, as the increased vigilance of sense bade
him watch yet a little longer.

With breath reeking of drink, with bloodshot eyes and reeling step, the
satyr entered.  Yet so great was the spell and charm of that womanly
purity and dauntless pride, that even lust and tyranny sank abashed on
the threshold, and a certain shame and hesitancy were visible in the
flushed face and bloodshot eyes.

"Why are you here?" asked the woman calmly.  "Have you mistaken your
way?"

"No,"--and the intruder advanced with sudden boldness.  "I have come to
ask if you are still of the same mind--still intent on destroying your
_friends_."  His laugh rang out mockingly.  "Fine friends truly for a
Princess Zairoff.  I gave you till to-night--come, which is to be
sacrificed--your womanly scruples, or the five hundred lives you have
fooled into security?"

Then she sprang to her feet, a statue no longer, but a living,
passionate woman.

"I have borne enough," she cried.  "Beware how you tempt the power that
has been strong enough to keep me from you all these years.  Beware,
too, how, once again, you stain your soul with innocent blood.
Thousands of voices are crying against you even now.  Thousands of years
of suffering on your part will not avail to buy you peace in the future.
I have prayed for these unfortunates, I have begged their lives at your
hands on my very knees.  Do not tempt me too far.  I say again--you do
not know what it is you do."

He laughed brutally.  "I know," he said, "that you shall pay for their
lives, or sacrifice them.  I have waited long enough.  I am sick of
hearing men rave about your beauty, and feeling that that beauty is no
more to me than if I were a beggar at my own gates."

"Do you forget," she said solemnly, "the compact we made?  I am not at
any man's choice, or disposal.  My life has a mission to accomplish, and
you, with all your brutal desires and evil passions, cannot turn that
life from its destined purpose.  Do not forget the warnings you have
already received."

So beautiful she looked, standing there in her floating, snowy
draperies, with her solemn, mysterious eyes fixed upon that sullen,
lowering face.  Beautiful and mysterious as some vestal priestess
defending the secrets of her Order.  But that beauty, for once, seemed
less to subjugate than to inflame the evil desires of that lower nature
to which it was bound.

"I will listen no more to vague threats," he said fiercely.  "I have
paid a heavy enough price for you.  I mean to enjoy my purchase.  See,
here is the list--they are fairly trapped--a word from you and they are
safe--these impatient fools.  Keep silence--and the knout, the mines,
the slow torturing death of Siberia, awaits them all.  Now, once again--
your answer?"

He drew nearer--his eyes aflame--his arms outstretched.

Then a change, wild and fearful, as that of the tropical tornado to a
southern landscape, swept over that lovely form.

Her eyes flashed, her figure seemed to dilate.  Slowly she raised her
arm and stretched it towards that brutal ravisher...

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Struggling, panting, tearing, as it were, against a power that bade him
hearken to that terrible answer, Julian Estcourt cried or seemed to cry
aloud in an agony of entreaty.

Then a rushing noise as of an unloosed torrent was in his ears; a dull,
confused pain beat like clanging hammers in his brain.

His eyes opened and he found himself, bathed in the cold sweat of more
than mortal terror, lying face downwards on the floor of his own
bedroom.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

In a blind, dazed fashion he struggled to his feet and rushed to the
window and let the cool night air blow over his face.  Every limb was
trembling; he could not think with any clearness.

In some dim, unconscious fashion he groped for his watch, found it, and
looked at the time.  A quarter-past one.  Only an hour had passed--an
hour--and he felt as if centuries had swept over his head in the vivid
horrors of that awful dream.

"But it was only a dream," he cried aloud, drawing in deep panting
breaths of the pine-scented air.  "Oh! thank God.  Thank God, it was
only a dream!"

And he sank on his knees and sobbed like a child in the star-lit
solitude of the night.



CHAPTER TWELVE.

EFFECTS.

The next day, when Colonel Estcourt sent to know if the Princess Zairoff
would receive him, he was informed she was ill, and could see no one.

Feeling strangely disinclined for mere ordinary society, he ordered his
horse to be brought round and spent the greater portion of the day in
long, fierce gallops over the miles of stretching sand that framed in
the bay.

The sky was chill and grey; a cold wind blew from the sea and dashed the
salt foam in his face as the waves swept stormily in.  But the dull sky
and the stormy sea suited his mood, and seemed to string up the relaxed
tension of his nerves.

"Nature is man's best physician after all," he said to himself, reining
in his beautiful Arab at last, and baring his brow to the fresh breeze.
"Even as she is his best friend.  Only we don't believe it.  We live in
the world and follow the ways of the world, until our faculties are
blunted, our natures demoralised, our tastes vitiated, our energies
enfeebled.  How many lands I have travelled over, how many cities I have
seen, and yet I verily believe that the wild Sioux in his prairies, and
the wandering Bedouin of the desert, have more of real manhood than we.
Yes; and get more real enjoyment out of life."

It was quite dusk before he reached the hotel.  The country was all new
and strange to him, and he had missed his way more than once.  But
though he was tired, and stiff, and hungry, he felt that his mental
energies were braced, his mind at ease, and the disturbing and torturing
memories of the previous night no longer tormented him.

At dinner he sat next to Mrs Ray Jefferson, who was radiant and voluble
as ever.

She had a great deal to say about the Princess, who, it appeared, had
again spent the morning in the Baths.

"She looked ill," said the little American.  "Awfully white and languid.
I asked her if she had seen a ghost.  There was something scared and
strange about her.  I surmise it's nerves.  It was odd, too," and she
lowered her voice as if taking the Colonel into a special confidence.
"But she went off to sleep in the hot room.  Nothing could waken her.  I
got rather frightened."

His face looked disturbed.  "To sleep?" he said.  "That is rather
unusual, is it not?"

"Oh, plenty of us go to sleep in the cooling-room," said Mrs Jefferson,
"but I never saw anyone do it in any of the others.  She was talking to
me, and then quite suddenly she said `I feel sleepy.  Please do not
speak.  I shall wake in a quarter of an hour.'  And so she did."

"You did not try to waken her, I suppose?" asked Colonel Estcourt
anxiously.

"Well, I did, but it was no use, so I let her be.  I saw she was all
right, because she breathed naturally, and her heart beat quite
regularly.  Still, it seemed odd.  I asked her maid afterwards about it.
She's a pretty little Frenchwoman, and always waits in the cooling-room
for her mistress.  But she didn't seem to think anything of it.  She
said she very often does that, and it is best not to try and waken her.
I must say she seemed much better afterwards.  Brighter and more alert.
What a lovely creature she is!" she added enthusiastically.  "I suppose
you know you're the most envied person in the hotel at this present
moment?"

He smiled, but his face still looked anxious and disturbed.

"Because I have the privilege of being her friend?" he said.  "Well, I
am not going to deny that it _is_ a privilege--a most enviable one."

"I should think," said Mrs Jefferson meaningly, "it is also one that
has its dangers."

The calm grey eyes met her sharp inquisitive glance, but were utterly
unrevealing.

"I will not affect to misunderstand you," he said, "but there are men
who covet danger for its own sake.  They may seem foolhardy, but they
are only accountable to themselves for the risks they run."

"Well," said Mrs Jefferson warmly, "I'm only a woman, and yet if it's
possible to fall in love with one of my own sex, I've done it.  She's
perfectly charmed me.  I can't get her out of my head for a single
moment.  It's not only her wonderful beauty, but her mind.  As for our
poet," she added, laughing, "he's quite gone.  He's done nothing all day
but moon about under the pine trees.  Writing sonnets, I guess, and
hoping to catch a glimpse of her.  All useless--she's not left the hotel
to-day, and I suppose she'll not favour us to night."

Colonel Estcourt was silent.  Conversation was more or less general, but
it sounded vague and unmeaning to him.  He heard a voice on his left
holding forth with energy, but he did not heed it until Mrs Jefferson
touched his arm and whispered an entreaty.

"Do listen," she said, "it's Diogenes.  Isn't he coming out?  I surmise
it's _her_ influence.  You remember last night?"

"An atheist," said the dogmatic voice of the individual who had given
that common-sense view of spiritualism the previous evening, "must be a
fool of the most complete type.  Because he doubts what _men_ teach of
God, is no reason for doubting the existence of God.  I grant that the
Reverend John Smith, with his high-falutin' trappings of Ritualism on
one side, and the Reverend Josiah Stiggins, with his coarse and
commonplace familiarity with the Almighty (whose personality he has the
effrontery to expound as if he were discussing the characteristics of an
ordinary mortal), on the other, are enough to drive hundreds of people
out of the pale of Christianity, and force them to take refuge in
defiance and opposition.  But, all the same, the expectation of another
life is a rooted belief in the minds of all men, quite apart from
religion.  Even the savage has it.  If we call it human nature to eat,
drink, fight, love, or desire, it must also be human nature that gives
universal assent to this idea of an after existence.  The fact of
finding it in all races is but a proof that Man is the creation of a
Power that intends him for a far wider range of existence than he sees
before him.  There are many things affirmed by man's consciousness that
he cannot really or logically explain.  Yet it is a narrow reasoning
that bids us reject the inexplicable."

"Yet you reject spiritualism," said Mrs Jefferson quickly.

"Not at all, my dear madam.  I only reject the humiliating and degrading
trickery that is its sensational form.  I only repeat what I said
yesterday, that no lofty or educated mind could do anything but resent
the idea of being subjugated to a mere material will, and being forced
by that will to perform conjuring tricks in order that a small portion
of the civilised world should gape, and gaze, and cry out `How
wonderful!'  To deny that spirits exist, aye and work, would be to deny
the very crudest faith in Christianity."

"There is no doubt," said Colonel Estcourt, "that everything _is_
explicable, but we must wait for the growth and development of our
higher natures before we can comprehend half the mysteries of the higher
life.  The great fault of the materialist and the scientist is, that
they would fain bring everything down to the level of their _present_
comprehension, instead of patiently waiting the completion of their
future spiritual forces.  It is quite evident that we are not meant to
attain our full mental stature on the earth-plane, or what would be left
to achieve in the countless ages of immortality?  Man believes in
immortality and yet seems to contemplate it as a state of stagnation and
quiescence.  Why he believes in it he cannot fully explain.  It is, as
you said before, a consciousness given to the races of humanity, but no
more capable of commonplace analysis than time, or space, or thought."

"The beautiful is as the cloud that floats in radiant space," murmured
the poet.  "The very vagueness of form permits the eye to clothe it in
the loveliest tints of Fancy."

"Now that's what I call rational," murmured Mrs Jefferson in Colonel
Estcourt's ear.  "Do you think he knows what he means.  I guess he
don't...  Gracious!"

She started, and suddenly grasped his arm.  "Look," she said, "there's
the princess in the doorway.  Is she coming in?  No!  She's moving away.
I believe she's going into the drawing-room after all.  Did you see
her?"

"No," said Colonel Estcourt.  "Are you sure it was the princess?"

His face looked strangely pale.  She saw that his hand trembled as he
laid down his knife on the plate before him.

"Sure?" exclaimed Mrs Jefferson, with asperity.  "Of course I'm sure!
It's not easy to mistake _her_, I fancy.  I can't think why you didn't
catch sight of her.  She just looked in as she passed, I suppose."

"No doubt," he said.  But the gravity and uneasiness of his face
deepened.

Just then one of the waiters paused beside Mrs Jefferson's chair.  She
turned eagerly to him.  "Watson," she said, "just oblige me by going to
the drawing-room and finding out if Madame Zairoff is there.  I guess,"
she added laughingly to Colonel Estcourt, "that I'm not going to waste
my time over thirteen courses if she is."

Still he did not speak, and his unusual pallor and gravity began to
affect the lively little American woman.  She helped herself to truffled
pheasant, and became absorbed in gastronomical duties.

Two or three minutes passed, when the man who had gone on her errand
returned.  She glanced eagerly up.

"Madame Zairoff is not in the drawing-room," he said in a low voice.  "I
met her maid on the stair-case, and she says that madame is not well
enough to leave her apartments this evening."

"But, good gracious me," began Mrs Jefferson, with angry impatience.
"I saw--"

"Hush," said Colonel Estcourt in a low, impressive voice.  "Oblige me by
saying nothing about it.  Remember, I too was looking in the same
direction, yet I saw--nothing."

Mrs Jefferson dropped her knife and fork and stared at him.

"Now, Colonel," she said, "am I in my senses, or am I not?  I've only
had iced water to drink.  I believe I'm a commonplace person eating a
commonplace, though very excellent, dinner.  Nothing's been playing
tricks with my nerves I can swear, and I do assure you that the Princess
Zairoff stood there in that doorway and looked in here, not five minutes
ago.  Why, I'll even tell you the gown she had on.  It was thick white
silk and had a border of soft-looking white fur.  There!" she added
triumphantly.  "You may go up to her rooms after dinner, and if she
hasn't got that gown on, and if she didn't come by that doorway--well--
I'll say I've gone stark staring mad!  That's so!"



CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

A PROMISE.

Just as the ladies had left the dining-room, a note was put into Colonel
Estcourt's hand.

He opened it and read the two brief lines it contained.  "I will see you
in my boudoir when you have finished dinner."

He pushed aside the glass he had just filled and left the table at once.

He knocked at the door of her room, and the low, sweet voice that bade
him enter, thrilled his heart with its accustomed sorcery.  He opened
the door, but as he stepped across the threshold, he suddenly paused,
and for a moment it seemed to him that his heart ceased to beat.  Was it
only chance that reproduced the dream-scene of the previous night, for
the suite of rooms were thrown open, and through the delicate amber
tints of the satin hangings gleamed the faint rose-hue of lamplight,
paling into opal in the farthest chamber but giving to all the soft and
glowing colouring he remembered so well.  Swiftly as his eyes took in
the picture, they seemed also to take in the lovely figure reclining
among soft snowy furs, robed in colourless silk bordered with the same
fur.

She raised herself on her arm as he approached.  "I have not treated you
well to-day, Julian," she said.  "But I have been ill--nervous--
disturbed.  I slept badly, and had terrible dreams.  You must forgive
me."

He bent over the extended hand and touched it with his lips.

"You are cold," she said.  "What is the matter?"

"I too, had a terrible dream," he said.  "I suppose the effects are
still upon me."  Then he looked calmly and fixedly at her.

"You were downstairs a few moments ago," he said.  "Why?"

She looked surprised.  "Did you see me?" she asked.

He shook his head.  "No," he said.  "It was your American friend."

Her face grew thoughtful.  "Then the power _is_ coming back," she said.
"I wonder why."

He seated himself beside her.  "Of course," he said, "it was not really
yourself?"

"I have not left this couch for three hours," she said.  "All the same,
I wanted to have a peep at you all."

"I hope you will not exercise that power too frequently," he said.  "You
know I never liked it."

"I know," she said, smiling up at his grave face, "that you were always
afraid I should not come back from my flights, but I always do.  _They_
send me--very much against my will--still, I must obey."

She sighed.  Then after a moment she put out her hand with a caressing
little gesture.  "What was your terrible dream?" she said.  "I see it is
troubling you still.  You are _distrait_ and absent.  Tell me."

He touched the white hand with his lips.

"I would rather not," he said, "because you were concerned in it, and it
seemed as if you were trying to reveal something or show me something
that I dreaded to see.  It was in fighting against seeing it that I
awoke."

She started from her reclining position and fixed her eyes on his face.
"Julian," she cried, in a sudden breathless way, "was it--was it?--No."
She broke off and wrung her hands helplessly.  "It has escaped me again.
I _cannot_ remember.  Oh, that I could!  It tortures me so.  Julian--"
and she looked at him appealingly.  "_You_ must help me--you must bring
it back.  I will not wed you till that mystery is solved.  Something
warns me against it."

"My dearest," he said soothingly, "do not excite yourself in this
fashion.  It can make no difference to me that there should be mystery
or tragedy in your past life.  Have I not always loved you?  Have we not
chosen the same path in life, only now we shall tread it side by side,
not one far in advance of the other?  The infinite delight of that
companionship shall not be marred by any memories of the past.  If I am
content to let it rest, surely you may be."

She drew herself away.  Her deep strange eyes looked coldly and yet
mournfully back to his yearning gaze.

"You were never a coward, Julian," she said.  "What is it you fear now?"

He threw himself on his knees by her side and buried his face in the
soft white furs.  She saw that he was trembling greatly.  "I cannot
tell," he said hoarsely.  "Would to God that I could!  But if you should
change, if you should repent--Oh! to lose your love now would kill me!"

She laid her hand on his bowed head.  "Rest assured you shall not lose
_that_," she said in her low thrilling voice.  "No, Julian, that is not
the danger--it threatens me, not you.  There will be no change on my
part, not so far as my love is concerned.  Will that assurance satisfy
you?"

"You need not ask that, beloved?  But why disturb our peace?  If I am
content--"

"There must be no secret between your soul and mine," she said solemnly.
"For what, think you, is your power granted, but that I may answer to
it, that I may lead you on the road--and that you, for me, may throw
open the portals?"

"In the future," he said eagerly, "I am content to do your will.  But
not now--not to draw the veil from our buried miseries.  Let them be as
dead things--out of sight and mind."

"You know," she said, "that nothing dies--not a life, or an act, or a
thought.  You may put the past out of sight, but it lives still--lives
in its hidden crimes, its secret sins, its evil and its good--lives to
haunt and shape our future, let that future dream as it will of
forgetfulness."

He rose from his knees, his face was still pale, but his eyes glowed
like living fire.

"When will you wed me, Estarah?" he asked, abruptly.

The soft colour flushed her cheek.  Her eyes drooped.

"My heart is yours," she said.  "My life lives but in the shadow of your
own.  Why should I withhold--this poor gift?"

She placed her hand in his, and let him draw her to his heart.  "I will
wed you when you will," she said, "but only if you yield to my
condition.  It is an easy one, Julian.  Why do you fear?"

Ah--why?  He could not answer that question to his own heart, much less
to hers.  He could not paint the shuddering horror which had forced him
to veil his eyes and shrink aghast from that last scene in his Dream.

Yet when he looked down on her in her pure womanly beauty, and felt the
clinging tenderness of her arms, and knew that among all the world of
men who had worshipped and wooed her, he alone had kept his place and
awakened a response of tenderness, he felt his heart thrill and glow
with sudden strength and pride.

"It shall be as you wish," he said.  "On the night that heralds our
bridal morn, I promise, if my power be still the same, that I will do
your bidding."

She lifted her face.  It was radiant with a strange mysterious joy.  "At
last," she said, brokenly--"at last I shall know.  Every page of my life
will be clear.  Heart to heart, soul to soul, so we shall stand, oh,
beloved!  You and I, with senses purified, with no secret unshared, with
spirits unfettered and souls at rest, so shall we greet our bridal morn.
For this did I brave the ordeal, for this have I faced almost the
bitterness of death--but the trial is almost over--the goal is almost
reached.  Go, now, my life's beloved, lest indeed my heart should break
beneath its weight of joy!  Go; but fear not.  I am yours for ever in
the life we know, and in the deep Unknown beyond I shall claim you
still!"



CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

THE DREAM INTERPRETED.

For some days no one in the hotel saw the Princess Zairoff.  But her
influence seemed to have left a distinct impression, judging from the
run on Buddhist literature at the different circulating libraries of the
town.  The "Occult World", "Isis Unveiled," and "Esoteric Buddhism" were
in great demand; so were various works on Mesmerism, Clairvoyance, and
Occult Science.

The poet plunged into "Zanoni," which he had read in the days of his
boyhood as one reads a fairy-tale, and he and Mrs Ray Jefferson, being
the greatest enthusiasts, held long and learned and quite unintelligible
discussions over these mysterious subjects, with a view to being able to
hold their own with the beautiful proselytiser when she should deign to
come amongst them all once more.

The weather had changed, and kept the invalids indoors, so there was
plenty of time for "serious reading," as Mrs Jefferson called it.

They took to calling the Princess "the Eastern mystery," and were quite
certain that she must be gifted with abnormal powers.  Mrs Jefferson
related the story of her appearance in the doorway, her belief in it
having long since been substantiated by Colonel Estcourt's reluctant
admission that the Princess was certainly attired in a white silk gown,
bordered and trimmed with white fur, when he went up to her rooms that
evening.

Mrs Masterman alone held out, and scoffed audibly at the mystic
literature, and what she called the "insane jabber" that went on in the
drawing-room every evening.

"Psychic phenomena, indeed!" the worthy lady would snort.  "Don't talk
to me about such rubbish!  It's just as bad as the mediums and the slate
writers."

"Dear madam," pleaded the gentle voice of the enamoured poet, "do not, I
pray you, confound these great mysteries with the strain of Human Error
running through their attempted explanation--an explanation only
intended to bring them down to the level of our material understandings.
Let me persuade you to read that most exquisite poem `The Light of
Asia.'"

"Light of your grandmother!" exclaimed Mrs Masterman with sublime
contempt.

"I fear," lamented the poet, "it never was granted to her.  She lived in
a benighted age.  She had not our privileges."

"And a very good thing too," said the purple-visaged dowager wrathfully.
"Privileges indeed!  Fine privileges, if honest, sober-minded
Christians are to learn the way to Heaven from heathens and idolaters.
You are all just as bad as those people Saint Paul speaks of, who were
always running after some new thing.  I'm happy to say my Bible and my
Church are good enough for me.  I don't want a new religion at my time
of life."

"The teachers in the Church are so very frequently our intellectual
inferiors," murmured the poet, "that they only excite commiseration, or
amusement."

"Well, I suppose they know their business," snapped Mrs Masterman, "I'm
sure no man would go into the Church if he didn't feel a call, and the
fact of his doing so and taking up that life should be enough to prevent
any right-minded person from ridiculing mere human frailties of voice
and manner and appearance."

"Unfortunately," murmured the poet, "I have been at college with several
embryo parsons.  But to the best of my recollection the only `special'
call they had for the _office_ was the call of some earthly relative or
friend who had a comfortable living at his disposal.  It seems to me--I
may be wrong, of course--but it really does seem to me that we have
quite reversed the old order of religious ministration.  At first every
worldly consideration, even the necessaries of life, were given up by
those who undertook the office.  Now, the office is only undertaken
_for_ the worldly considerations, and the necessities of life--"

"Oh," cried Mrs Masterman, losing her temper, which even at the best of
times was exceedingly hard to keep.  "You go off, young man, to your
`Lights of Asia,' and all your other idolatrous rubbish.  The truth is
this foreign woman has bewitched you all, and will end in making you
heathens like herself.  Thank goodness I've too much sense to listen to
her.  It's my belief she'll turn out a murderess, or a fire worshipper,
or something of that sort before we've seen the last of her.  I don't
like mysterious persons!  If she hadn't had big eyes, and a straight
nose, and a figure like those Venuses and creatures who hold the lamps
in the corridors, no one here would have troubled their heads about
her!"

And she swept away contemptuously, leaving the poet utterly aghast at
her last indignant speech.  He repeated it to Mrs Ray Jefferson, who
was reclining in a rocking-chair, endeavouring to comprehend "The Light
of Asia."  The endeavour, however, was not very successful, and she
hailed the approach of the poet with delight.  His account of the
conversation filled her with wrath and indignation.  The feelings might
have been partially due to Mrs Masterman's remembered snubs on the
matter of "feet," and "suppressed gout," at the Turkish Bath.  They
certainly rose strongly to the occasion, and, with the help of sundry
powerful Americanisms, gave a very fair display of vituperative
eloquence.

The poet was more and more convinced that there was only one perfect
woman in the world, and that was the beautiful creature whom he had
apostrophised in sonnets as:--

  "Mysterious Mystery, whose bright sad eyes,
  Wild as the roe, and deep with undreamt dreams."

  Etcetera, etcetera.

So he listened and sighed, and in a low and plaintive voice, significant
of hidden woe and much "soul suffering," to quote from another effusion,
he read to her fragments of the "Light of Asia," which she could not in
the least comprehend, but which she bluntly criticised as "not half bad
to listen to if you felt drowsy."

"Oh, but I do wish the Princess would come down," she said at last in
the intervals of a "selection."

"I've such hundreds of questions to ask her.  Seems to me she dropped
the seed in pretty fruitful soil the other night, for we're all just
`gone' on occultism.  Only we don't know anything about it.  Ah, there's
Colonel Estcourt, I'll ask him if it's possible to have her down this
evening.  I don't mind which body she comes in: the Astral or the
ordinary.  In fact, I think I should prefer the former.  Colonel!" she
called out, raising her voice.  "Come here, I want to speak to you."

She put her request to him as he obeyed her summons, and put it with an
earnestness and fervour that showed it was sincere, and not the formula
of idle curiosity.

"I don't know," he said, "if it will be possible, but, if the princess
consents, I will arrange that two or three of you shall have an
opportunity of witnessing how really marvellous her powers are.  She
never makes a display or show of them, for reasons which you cannot yet
understand, but, if she consents, I should like you, Mrs Jefferson, and
my young friend here (smiling at the poet's excited face), and one or
two other people interested in the matter, to come up to her boudoir
this evening.  I will just send up a note and ask."

"I could just worship you, Colonel," cried the little American,
ecstatically.  "It's real good of you to offer such a glorious treat to
us."

"Do not thank me yet," he said, smiling; "you do not know whether you
will be received."

At the same moment there came a sound in the air above their heads--
soft, clear, vibrating--like the faint echo of a silver bell.

Mrs Jefferson started, the poet turned pale.  Colonel Estcourt looked
at them gravely.

"It is the answer," he said.  "You may come.  She will receive us.  Who
else do you wish to invite?"

"Oh, my husband, if I may," cried Mrs Jefferson, eagerly, "and
Diogenes--he's so solid and sensible.  His imagination never plays
tricks with him."

"Very well," said Colonel Estcourt, "bring them also."

------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Princess Zairoff was seated in her boudoir reading, as the party
filed in, headed by Colonel Estcourt.

She rose and greeted them with the same sweet and gracious manner that
had so charmed Mrs Jefferson.

"I know why you are here," she said, as the little American burst into
vivacious explanations.  "I am quite ready to do anything Julian wishes.
You know--or, perhaps, you do not know--that he trained my
_clairvoyante_ faculties long ago.  They are natural to me, I suppose;
but you do not require to be told that even natural gifts are capable of
training and improving to almost any extent."  She turned to Mrs
Jefferson.  "You have some power," she said, "you saw me the other
night.  No one else did."

Mrs Jefferson looked highly gratified.  "Oh, Madame Zairoff," she
cried, "I'd give up everything in the world to have your wonderful
gifts."

"Even Worth's gowns?" said the princess, smiling.  "What about the
pleasant vanities we talked so much about?"

"Oh, bother the vanities.  I've found out life can be much more
interesting than when it's merely frivolous," said the American,
heartily.  "Is there anything I _could_ do to become an occultist?"

Colonel Estcourt laughed outright.

"My dear Mrs Jefferson," he said, "the life is not by any means easy,
or gratifying.  I think you had better consider it carefully, and weigh
it well in the balance with the `creations' of Worth, and the
magnificence of your diamonds, for somehow the two things won't pull
together, and you haven't even learnt the A B C of occult science yet."

"No," she said, seating herself, "I suppose not.  Well, please begin my
lesson."

"This will not be a lesson," he said, gravely, "only an illustration.
May I ask you all to be seated?"

They took various chairs and seats, and the princess threw herself on
the couch, nestling back among her favourite white bear-skins, with a
smile on her lips.

Colonel Estcourt removed a rose-shaded lamp from the stand, and placed
it behind her, so that the light should not shine directly into her
eyes.  They were all watching her intently in the full expectation of
something to be done or said that was mysterious and awe-inspiring.
Colonel Estcourt then seated himself on a chair opposite the couch.  For
a moment their eyes met and lingered in the gaze, then hers closed
softly, and she seemed to sleep as peacefully and gently as a child in
its cradle.

No one spoke.  Suddenly a voice broke the stillness--clear, sweet, and
sonorous--the voice of the sleeper, though her lips scarcely moved, nor
did the placid expression of her face change.

"What you desire to know is the storied wisdom of past ages, the fruits
of the deepest and most earnest research of which human minds are
capable.  These fruits have only been gathered after long and painful
study, after severe training of every spiritual faculty, and the
repression of all lower material inclinations and desires.  There is but
one among all who listen to me now, capable of undertaking such study,
or undergoing such an ordeal.  The day is at hand when he may choose it,
if he will.  They who bid me speak now, are willing that you should
learn some lesson to benefit yourselves, and your fellow men.  They say
to you, oh Poet, `Perfect those gifts of your higher nature--yet be not
of them vainglorious, since, humanly speaking, they are not yours, but
lent for a purpose, and the brief space of earth-life.'  Look upon every
beautiful thought, every gift of expression, as the direction of One who
has dowered you with the possibility of opening other eyes to the
beauty, and other minds to the understanding of such expression.
Remember there is a great truth in your favourite lines that _Karma_ is
`the total of a soul.'  `The things it did, the thoughts it had, the
Self it wove, with woof of viewless time, crossed on the warp invisible
of acts.'

"There is another listener here--one who has wrestled with the secrets
of Nature.  To him I say, `Be not over vain of the triumph gained by
simple accident of discovery.  Turn that discovery to better uses than
the mere amassing of wealth.  Let the poor, the sick, the needy, gain
health and happiness from your hands, and let their voices bless you for
good wrought amongst them.  For nothing is so pitiful and so abhorrent,
as the worship of wealth, and the selfishness that eats like a corroding
poison into the purer metal of the rich man's nature.  Your wealth will
only bring you happiness in so far as you use it to benefit others less
fortunate though equally deserving.  It is given you as a trial, not as
a reward.'--To you, oh Cynic, this message have I also: `Your eyes see
but through a veil of dulled and vainglorious senses.  Some truths you
have learned, but in the passage through your mind they take the colour
and shape of a distorted and embittered fancy.  You have a work to do,
and influence to do it; but your _will_ must become humble, and then you
will learn the sweets of true knowledge, and be able to disseminate
truth and wisdom.  Now you absorb it into your own mind, for your own
satisfaction, and for the poor triumph of discouraging those of lower
mental stature, and of natures lighter and grosser than your own.  To
the true Prophet and the true Philosopher, he himself is insignificant
before the great truths he has learnt, and his personal identity
willingly sinks into obscurity, so only that these truths may live.'"

For a moment she ceased, and the different faces looked curiously
uncomfortable and startled at so keen a vivisection of their inner
natures.  Mrs Ray Jefferson, however, feeling that she had been left
out in the cold, and anxious for a special message to herself, broke the
spell of silence.

"Have you nothing to say to me, Princess?" she asked beseechingly.

Then the beautiful head moved restlessly to and fro, and the face grew
less placid and child-like.  She began to speak, but now the words came
in quick disjointed fragments.  "They are standing beside you," she
said.  "I must go.  You may come with us, but not Julian.  Keep Julian
away... keep Julian away--"

"What does she mean?" cried Mrs Jefferson, turning pale.  "And--oh
gracious!" she cried to her husband, "look at Colonel Estcourt.  Is he
going to faint?"

All eyes turned on the Colonel.  He lay back on his chair white and
gasping.  "My God," he cried in a stifled voice.  "My power is gone.  I
can't hold her.  I can't keep her back."

"She is speaking again," cried Mrs Jefferson, in low, terrified
accents.  "Oh, I don't half like this.  I wish we had never come."

Then a great awe and stillness fell upon them, and, despite their terror
and their dread, every ear strained to catch the quick disjointed words
that fell from those strange lips.

"I am there...  How still the streets are, and the snow--how fast it
falls.  How they crowd round the palace gate to-night.  Stay the horses,
Ivan, I will speak...  Do not fear, my friends, your lives are safe.  I
promise it...  What is this?  My rooms?  How lonely they seem to-night.
`Alone?'  Yes, I am always alone.  No lover's step has ever echoed
through this cloistered silence.  Alone and sad.  Ah! how I have
suffered here...  What do they say?  It will be over soon, it will be
over--soon.  One more battle to win.  Let me summon all my courage now.
I have faced ordeals before.  I have forgotten woman's fears, and laid
aside woman's scruples.  Am I not pure?  Am I not brave?  Yet why do I
tremble?  One weakness is still unconquered, one human love burns true
and deep and steadfast in my heart.  I cannot cast it out.  I _will_
not; not even at your bidding; not even to make my task easier.

"A step in the silence...  Who dares to cross my chambers?  Courage, my
heart.  There on the threshold stand my White Guard.  Why should I fear?
Courage! courage--"

Like one carved in stone Julian Estcourt sat and listened.  The dumb
misery of a terrible expectance held every faculty in its iron grasp.
Was his dread to be realised?  It seemed so, for all control was gone; a
higher power had seized the reins.  She had escaped him, and an awful
horror was upon him lest he, in his folly and shortsightedness, had
assembled these people here only to be witnesses of the degradation of
the peerless creature he had so worshipped and so loved.

Spell-bound they sat and listened.  The rose-light from the lamps
falling upon their white, set faces, and the quivering tension of their
silent lips.

The voice of the sleeper went ruthlessly on.

Scene for scene, word for word, Julian Estcourt lived over again through
the wild dread and horror of his Dream.  Scene for scene, word for word,
those wondering startled listeners saw it reproduced, though to them it
was scarce intelligible.

At last, she reached the point where his endurance had snapped beneath
the strain of terror, but now his every force was numbed--his will
seemed paralysed.  One feeble helpless effort he made to lock those lips
into silence, to chain back the self-betrayal of that unconscious
speech.  But love had made him weak, and passion had stifled the acute,
unerring faculties that once had bent her to his will.

He was powerless.  He could only sit there dumbly--stupidly--listening
for what he felt was sure as the death stroke of the headsman to his
doomed victim.  Again she spoke.

"The steps approach--yet what is this?  _They_ are no longer on the
threshold.  I am alone--alone--yet what new power is mine!  My brain
seems to dilate!  Space can scarce confine me!  All fear has gone!  And
it is thus you would have me yield to your brutal force, your drunken,
degraded senses!  Back, rash intruder, touch me not if you value life!"

Then, while still they gazed and listened, the beautiful figure rose
slowly from its nest of snowy furs; rose and stood in its wonderful,
indolent, voluptuous grace, upright before those dazed and awe-struck
eyes.

But a change came over the quiet beauty of the face.  It seemed as if
some hidden flame had sprung to life and flashed and quivered in the
wide-opened eyes and convulsed features.  They saw a shiver, such as
shakes the sea before the blast of the coming tempest, bend and sway the
perfect form...

Once, twice, her lips opened, but no words came.  At last she seemed to
force the channels of speech, but the low sweet music of her voice was
harsh and jangled with passion.

"My answer?  Take it, ravisher and murderer of innocence and youth!
Die! in your crimes--Die!"

She stretched out her arm.  There came a hoarse cry, a crash, a heavy
fall.  Julian Estcourt lay upon the floor, white and senseless as the
dead.



CHAPTER FIFTEEN.

EXPIATION.

A severe attack of her "suppressed" enemy, and a nervous headache, the
result of the shock of the previous evening, had driven Mrs Ray
Jefferson to the Turkish bath as early as ten o'clock the morning after
that strange exhibition of Clairvoyance.

She had the rooms all to herself, and as she leant back in her
comfortable chair and dabbled her pretty bare feet in warm water; she
reflected in a troubled and disjointed fashion over all that had
occurred since that eventful morning when the beautiful "mystery" had
appeared before her standing in that curtained archway, which indeed
looked a prosaic enough portal, and not by any means the sort of
threshold for the development of occult science, or psychical marvels.

"She's completely unsettled me," she murmured plaintively.  "How I wish
I had never gone to her rooms last night.  And that poor Colonel
Estcourt--I wonder if he'll ever recover--they say he's never moved nor
spoken since they took him away last night.  I wonder what she really
meant, and if she did kill that man she spoke of.  I don't think it's
possible.  I expect she only _willed_ it, and that's not murder.  Ugh!"
and she shuddered even in the warmth of the hot room where she had
selected to go first.  "If the story leaks out--though I hope to
goodness it won't--how delighted that horrid Mrs Masterman will be.
She never liked her.  Well I'm--if that isn't the princess herself
coming in!  Her trance doesn't seem to have hurt her."

Slowly and languidly through the open doorway, the beautiful figure
swept in and up to the smaller chamber where sat the little American.

As Mrs Ray Jefferson looked at her, she became conscious of some subtle
intangible change that had shadowed, as it were, the marvellous beauty
of her face and form.  Her large deep eyes had lost their lustre, her
clear creamy skin looked dull and opaque.  Even the magnificent hair
seemed to have been robbed of its sheen, and here and there amidst its
masses gleamed a silvery thread.

Up to this moment her age had been a matter of much speculation, varying
from eighteen to twenty-six.  Now one would have said unhesitatingly
that she was a woman of at least thirty years, and a woman who did not
carry those years lightly.

She sat down by Mrs Jefferson, and spoke in a low nervous voice.  "I
knew I should find you here," she said.  "I want your help.  I think you
have always been my friend here.  Do me one service.  Tell me what
occurred in my room last night."

"Do you mean to say?" asked Mrs Jefferson, amazed, "that you don't
know?"

"Should I ask if I did?" she said, mournfully.  "A great weight and
terror are on my soul--yet I cannot explain them.  In some of my trances
I keep the memory of all I see; in some I lose it.  I know nothing of
what I said last night after you spoke and I parted from Julian.  It was
your voice that came between us.  You have great psychic power; but it
is undeveloped."

"Good gracious!" cried Mrs Jefferson; "then, if I'm responsible for
what happened last night, I'll have nothing more to do with Occultism as
long as I live."

"I can't tell why it was," resumed the Princess, mournfully.  "The chain
of communication broke, and I got away, and my great dread was that
Julian should suffer."

"Well, your dread is realised," said Mrs Jefferson.  "Don't you know
he's very ill?"

She started, and grew deadly white.  "Ill--Julian!  No; I did not know.
What is it?--serious do they say?"

"Very.  Some shock to the brain.  You know he was far from strong.  He
was only home from India on sick leave."

The princess was silent for a moment.  Her face looked inexpressibly
mournful.  Involuntarily her hand went to her heart, and she looked at
Mrs Jefferson with sad, appealing eyes.  "I have suffered a great
deal," she said, slowly.  "I only bore it for his sake--for the hope
they gave me that one day we should meet, and love, and taste the
happiness of life together.  Tell me, was it anything I said or revealed
that shocked him?"

"Well--I guess so," said the little American, uneasily.  "Of course, to
us it was all mysterious; but he seemed to make it out, and at last,
when you rose up and stretched out your arm and cried out, `Die! in your
crimes--_die_!' the Colonel just gave a sort of gasp, and crash went his
chair, and he lay there on the floor like a dead creature.  We were all
finely scared, I can tell you.  The odd part was that you went to sleep
again like a child, just as simply and quietly as possible, and my
husband and the poet, and poor old Diogenes, they got the Colonel to his
room, and laid him on the bed, and we sent for a doctor, and he's not
conscious yet.  That's all I can tell you."

The Princess Zairoff leant back on her chair white and silent.  She
asked no more questions.

Presently an attendant appeared with obsequious inquiries.  The princess
suddenly shivered.  "Ask them," she said, abruptly, "to bring up the
temperature to 300 degrees, I am cold."

"Cold!"  Mrs Jefferson stared.  "I guess it's as well I came here
first," she said, "for certainly I can't stand it 50 degrees hotter than
it is at present.  I'll go into the second room.  You see I'm reversing
the usual order this morning.  Three, two, one, instead of one, two,
three.  I'll sit just here by the door, so that we can still talk if you
wish.  I look like a boiled lobster, I'm sure."

Princess Zairoff said nothing.  But when the American had withdrawn, she
threw herself down on a couch near the wall.  By choosing it she was out
of sight of anyone in the adjoining room, though able to converse if she
wished.

That she did not wish was very evident.  No sooner was she alone than an
expression of intense anguish came over her face.  Her hands locked
themselves together, an agony far beyond the weakness of tears was in
her beautiful eyes.

"I have lost him," she cried, in a stifled whisper.  "Lost him for
ever... and it was for this we were brought together...  For this I was
commanded to learn the secret of my failure.  Yes, I, who thought myself
so wise, have failed...  Failed at the crucial test, because my passions
governed me... because my heart was weak, for sake of love...  Oh, my
lost strength--my lost self-restraint...  Must I again tread the weary
road... and only overcome to fail again?"

She turned aside and hid her face in her hands, while all that dusky
veil of rippling hair fell over her like a cloud.

"I am so human still," she moaned--"so human that, woman-like, I
deceived myself, and dreamt of love perfected here, when I might have
known--I might have known...  But, oh, to lose him thus!  To stand
before his eyes shamed, sin-stricken, criminal--I cannot bear that--it
is beyond my strength..."

A new fierce passion seemed suddenly to take possession of her soul.
She raised herself once more, and the old lovely light and splendour
glowed in her eyes.

"There is but one way to win his forgiveness," she cried breathlessly.
"He will pity me then... his heart will soften... he will remember what
I said on that strange happy night when once again we met...  I am but a
woman who loves.  Earth holds no weaker thing... and I loved you,
Julian... you only--you alone! always--always--always.  Men live for
love--a woman can but die.  For the life I took I give my own--it is
just...  Yet if but once, oh, beloved, I could see your pitying eyes,
and hear your tender voice... and know that you--forgave..."

The light faded from her face once more.  Only a hunted, despairing
creature leaned back on that solitary couch.

A voice came shrilly from the outer room: "Are you all right, Princess?
Can you really bear that heat?"

Monotonously--vaguely--her own voice replied: "I am all right--I do not
even feel the heat."

Then, all again grew still, and her eyes closed, and her heart beat in a
dull, laboured way.

Once more the shrill voice reached her; but it sounded far off, and
indistinct: "I hope you won't go off to sleep, like you did the last
time, Princess; you frightened me terribly."

The effort to reply was harder to make; yet once again the slow, sweet
voice vibrated through the hushed and stifling heat:

"I shall not sleep--do not be alarmed."

Five minutes later, when Mrs Ray Jefferson lifted her eyes from an
examination of her suffering foot, she was surprised to see the Princess
standing in the archway of the further room, exactly as she had done on
the first occasion of her visiting the Baths.

"Are you going?" she called out.  "How is it I never saw you pass
through the room?"

There was no answer--only the deep, wonderful eyes looked mournfully
back at her, and, even as she met the gaze, the form seemed to fade
away--the archway was vacant.

With a faint cry, Mrs Jefferson sprang to her feet, and rushed into the
inner room.  The intense heat stifled, and drove her back; but not
before she saw the Princess lying on the couch, where she had left
her... lying with closed eyes and folded hands; while on her pale, sad
lips a faint smile seemed still to shed its lingering life.

The frantic calls of the terrified woman summoned the attendants.  In a
moment, that motionless figure was lifted and carried into the adjoining
chamber.

But human science and human aid were powerless before a greater Mystery
than the Princess Zairoff had embodied.  The "Mystery of Death!"

THE END.





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