“Deception is not hard,” he told her, “the world is full of fools and even the sensible are easy to deceive.”
“From what I have read,” she continued, “you do not deceive. Your advice is good. Your precepts guide your clients right. Your suggestions lead to success. Your predictions come to pass, your conjectures are verified.”
“All that is true enough,” he allowed. “Then how can you call your clients dupes, your methods mummeries, your answers lies?” She wound up triumphantly.
“I did not call my answers lies,” he disclaimed. “Mummeries I deal in and to dupes. Dupes they are all. They pour gold into my lap to tell them what they already knew if they but reasoned it out calmly with themselves. They babble to me all they need to know and pay me insensately for it when I fling back to them a patchwork of the fragments I have extracted from their stories of expectations, apprehensions and memories.”
“But if you do all that you must be a real judge of human nature, a genuine reader of hearts, a keen-brained counsellor.”
“I am all that and more,” he bragged. He had lost every trace of agitation and bore himself with a dashing self-confidence of manner, extremely engaging. “I cannot minister to a mind diseased; but I am called on to prescribe for all sorts of delusions, follies, blunders, miseries and griefs. I could count by thousands the men and women I have saved, the lives I have made happy, the difficulties I have annihilated, the aspirations I have guided aright.”
“Then you must have an immense experience of human frailties and human needs.”
“Vast, enormous, incalculable,” he declared.
“Your advice then should be valuable.”
“It is valuable,” he boasted.
“Then advise me, I am in extreme distress. I have felt that no one could help me. The belief that you might has given me a ray of hope. You have expressed a regard for me altogether extraordinary. Will it not lead you to help me?”
“Any advice and help, any service in my power you may be sure shall be yours,” he said earnestly. “But let me ask you first, how was it that you did not seek the advice of some business-man, lawyer or clergyman? You are not at all of the light-headed type of those frivolous women who flock to me and to others like me. You have common sense, unalterable principles, rat3nal instincts and personal fastidiousness, why did you not go to one of the recognized, established, honored advisers of humanity? Tell me that if you please?”
“It was because of the dream,” she faltered.
“The dream!” he exclaimed. “A dream sent you to me? What sort of a dream?”
“I had come to feel that there could be no hope for me,” she said. “But about a month ago I had a dream in which I was told 'The seventh advertisement in the seventh column of the seventh newspaper in the seventh drawer of the linen room will point for you the way to escape from your miseries and win what you desire.' There should have been no papers in my linen-room and it made me feel foolish to want to go and look. Also the servants knew I never went there, so I had to watch until the housekeeper was out and no maids were on that floor. Sure enough I found seven old newspapers in the seventh drawer, and on the seventh page of the lowermost paper, on the seventh column, the seventh advertisement was yours.”
“And you came to me because of that dream?”
“Yes: — and; — ” she hesitated.
“Well,” he interrupted, “the reasons why you came are not so important. What I want to be sure of is this. Even if you were led to come by a mere coincidence acting on your feelings, are you now, from cool, deliberate reflection, determined to consult me? Would it not be better to take my advice at this point and go to one of the world's regular, accredited dispensers of wisdom?”
“I have made up my mind to consult you,” she said. “It is not a passing whim, but a settled resolve.”
“Then madame,” he said, his manner wholly changing, “you must tell me all your troubles without any reservation of any kind. If I am to help you I must know your case as completely as a physician would have to know your symptoms in an illness. Tell me plainly what your trouble is.
She began to pluck at her veil with her gloved hands.
“Oh,” she gasped, “let me moisten my lips. Just a swallow of water.” For all his lameness he was surprisingly agile, as he wrenched himself up, tore open the rear door and almost instantly hobbled back with a glass and silver pitcher on a small silver tray.
She took off her veil and one glove. Several swallows were required to compose her. When she was calm again he sat looking at her with a face full of inquiry, but without uttering any questions.
“You do not know,” she said, “how hard it is to begin.”
“For the third time, Madame,” he said, “I advise you not to consult me, to go elsewhere.”
“Are you not willing to help me?” she asked, softly.
“Utterly willing,” he said, “but timid, timid as a doctor would be about prescribing for his own child. Yours is the first case ever brought to me in which I feared the effect of personal bias dimming my insight or deflecting my judgment. I have a second confession to make to you. Before you married, a man desperately in love with you came to me for help. Among other things he gave me the day, hour and minute of your birth and of his and asked me to cast both horoscopes and infer his chances of success. I had and have no faith in astrology, yet I had cast my own horoscope long before from mere curiosity. When I cast yours I was amazed at the clear indications of a connection between your fate and mine. I did not believe anything of the Babylonian absurdities, yet the coincidence struck me. Perhaps I am influenced by it yet. Under such an influence, even more than under that of my feeling for yourself, my acumen is likely to be impaired. I again advise you to go elsewhere.”
“I am all the more determined to consult you and you only.”
He bowed without any word and waited in silence for her to go on. She stared at him with big melting eyes, her face very pale.
“My husband does not love me,” she said.
“Not love you?” Vargas exclaimed, startled. “Do you mean seriously to tell me that, you who have been loved by hundreds, been adored, worshipped, courted by so many, for despair of gaining whom men have gone mad, who have had your choice of so many lovers, are not prized by the man who succeeded in winning you?”
“Yes,” she barely breathed. “He does not prize me, nor love me at all.”
“Does he love any one else?”
Out of her total paleness she flushed rose pink from throat to hair. “Yes,” she admitted.
“Who is she?” Vargas demanded.
“His first wife.”
Vargas staggered to his feet. “I did not so much as know that your husband had been married before,” he gasped, “let alone that he was divorced.”
“He was not divorced,” she stated. “Not divorced,” he quavered.
“No, he was a widower when I married him.” Vargas collapsed back into his chair.
“I do not understand,” he told her. “Does he love a dead woman?”
“Just that,” she asseverated.
“This will not do,” the clairvoyant told her, “I cannot come nearer to helping you at this rate. Try to give me the information you think necessary, not by splinters and fragments, but as a whole. Make a connected exposition of the circumstances. Begin at the beginning.
“That is harder,” she mused, “I always want to begin anything at the last chapter.”
“Woman fashion,” he commented. “You are above that in most things, I know. Try a straight story from the beginning.”
She reflected:
“The beginning,” she said, “was before I began to remember. David and I were playmates before we could talk. Boy and girl, lad and lass, we always belonged to each other, there was no love-making between us, I think, for it was all love-living. I do not believe he ever asked me to marry him or promised to marry me, or so much as talked marriage. But we had a clear understanding that we were to marry as soon as we could, at the earliest possible day. He did not merely seem wrapped up in me, he was. God knows he was all my life. Then he had no more than seen Marian Conway when he fell in love with her. There is no use in dwelling on what I suffered. He married almost at once and I gave myself up to that empty life of frivolity which made me a reigning beauty and brought me scores of suitors for none of whom I cared anything and which gave me not a particle of satisfaction. Then after they had lost both their children Marian died. David was frightfully overcome by his loss. He had loved her inconceivably and he showed his grief in the most heart-rending ways. He had the coffin opened over and over after it had been closed. He had it even lifted out of the grave and opened yet once more for one more look at her face. He spent every moment from her death to her burial in a sort of adoration of her corpse, and he did stranger things. I do not know whether it was Mr. Llewellyn's valet who told, but at any rate the story got out among the servants. The night before she was buried he had her laid out in her coffin and a second coffin exactly like it set beside her's. He stayed locked in the room all night. They believed he lay in the other coffin. At any rate in the morning it was closed, and he did not allow it to be opened. What he had placed in it no one knew. They said it was as heavy as the other. Two hearses, one behind the other, carried the coffins to the graveyard. Her grave is not under the monument — you have seen the monument?”